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When the 
Morning Wakens 
MALCOLM JAMES MacLEOD 


De 





moore? 


he 
7 
a 
f 


‘When the y 


BY . x y 
MALCOLM JAMES MacLEOD 


Minister, Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas 
New York City 


AUTHOR OF “WHAT GOD HATH JOINED TOGETHER,” 
“SONGS IN THE NIGHT,” ETC., ETC. 


NEW Cs YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, 


BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


WHEN THE MORNING WAKENS 
—A— 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


CHAPTER 


I 
Il 


CONTENTS 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face To See” 


“Follow With Reverent Steps the Great Ex- 
UITIDIC seh ca eete chy. ee 


“Tf I Still Hold Closely To Him” . 

“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” . 
“Bringing in the Sheaves” . : 

“In Lowly Paths of Service Free” ; 
“T Know Too Well the Poison and the Sting” 
“There’s a Star to Guide the Humble” . 
“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” . 

“I Do Not Ask To See the Distant Scene’ 
“Go Spread Your Trophies At His Feet” . 


“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot, Upward I 
BV ye tine, cea te 


“Outside the Fast-Closed Door” . ; 
“Thy Touch Has Still Its Ancient Power” 
“By Some Clear Winning Word of Love” . 
“Land Where My Fathers Died’. 


ieee es 
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Pie Aaa ie, 


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BA A Geo Te ES 


9 
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WHEN THE MORNING 
W AKENS 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face to See” 


“For I am in a strait betwixt two, having 
a desire to depart and to be with Christ 
which is far better.” 


Philippians 1:21. 


AND perhaps Moffat’s translation is clearer, “I can- 
not tell which to choose, life or death: I am in a 
dilemma: my strong desire is to depart and be with 
Christ for that is far the best. But for your sakes it 
is necessary I should live on here below.” I like that 
word dilemma. “I’m in a dilemma.” Sometimes I 
think I’d prefer to die, sometimes I want to live. Of 
course dying is better, because it means being with 
Christ, but then again for your sakes I am anxious to 
live on and try and do some good in the world. 

Well, that is the spirit of the Apostle as he writes 
to the Philippian Christians, and isn’t it a wonder- 
ful spirit? Can you picture anything finer? Where 
is there anything just like it? No Mohammedan says, 

9 


10 When the Morning Wakens 


I have a desire to depart and be with Mohammed. 
I am told there is a Buddhist hymn which begins: 


“Buddha, lover of my soul, 
Let me to thy bosom fly.” 


But it’s a mighty poor plagiarism and anyway it soon 
dies away in the stark emptiness of Nirvana. 
Remember he was a prisoner when he penned these 
words, a prisoner in Rome, with the very worst likely 
to happen. But we do not get that information from 
him. He makes no reference to it at all, He doesn’t 
ask any pity on that score. He is not playing the 
sympathy game. Paul never capitalizes his misfor- 
tunes. He was waiting for the word of the Emperor 
telling whether it was to be life or Nero’s axe. But 
that did not trouble him a particle. He was ready for 
either life or the axe. He has often been compared 
with Hamlet, but the comparison is not well taken. 
Hamlet was crushed by the frightful discovery that 
his uncle had murdered his father and then married 
his mother. And with this burden weighing on his 
mind, life becomes intolerable, and he cries out: 


“To be or not to be, that is the question: 
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
And by opposing end them.” 


Who would bear all the vexations and wrongs and 
rebuffs of life when they can put an end to them? 
With Hamlet life is a dreadful thing and death is 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face to See’ I1 


dreadful too. Life is bad and it is quite possible death 
may be worse. That’s Hamlet. That is not Paul’s 
perplexity at all. We never hear Paul haranguing 
on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, never. 
With Paul life is a drtvine thing, a sublime thing, a 
glorious thing, and death more glorious. Hamlet 
regards life and death as evils and does not know 
which evil to choose. Paul regards both as blessings 
and he cannot decide which blessing to elect. So he is 
face to face with a great alternative. The one would 
keep him in a work which he had learned to love; the 
other would bring him to a holy fellowship which he 
had learned to long for. 

The Apostle was none of your gloomy mopers. He 
was no morbid hypochondriac. There were too many 
beautiful things to do in the world, too much to live 
for, too many good causes to help, too many souls to 
cheer. He never asked that old stale question, Is life 
worth living? Nobody does ever ask that question but 
a trifler. He knew that life was well worth living to 
him who has real worth in his make-up and a real 
purpose and a real passion and a real hope. 

It is not that life in this world is not good; it is 
good; good and great and glorious. He loved life; 
he loved his work; he loved his message; he loved his 
churches; he loved his friends. ‘“’Tis good,” he 
thought, “to be a child of God in training for a better 
country.”’ And yet with all its joy and blessedness and 
areas of service, life is not to be compared with death: 
it is better to be where all our hopes are fulfilled. 
Death is the real prize. Death is a gain. 


12 When the Morning Wakens 


It must be confessed there are not many who feel 
thuswise to-day. There are of course the old and 
infirm who look forward longingly to the end. There 
are those in pain praying most earnestly that the good 
Lord would grant them deliverance. There are many 
in the vast army of the discouraged and disillusioned 
who are willing to own up, “I’m tired and sick of it 
all,’ But how many in good health and happy in 
their work do we see who are ready to say, “I would 
rather go home and be with God’? Not many, I 
venture. ’Twould be an abnormal thing. Life to most 
of us is sweet and pleasant and enjoyable and desirable. 

I think one reason for this wonderful attitude on 
the part of the Apostle was the man’s feeling of cer- 
tainty. He was so amazingly sanguine. The future to 
him was not a matter of speculation or haze or bewil- 
derment or fog: it wasn’t a leap in the dark. It was 
not a happy guess. He was supremely and unquali- 
fiedly confident. Many things were doubtful but not 
this. Death was a going to Christ. Christ Himself 
had said: “I go to prepare a place for you.” And 
the Apostle believed the promise and clung to it with 
every tendril of his being. There was no question in 
his mind on that point, no vagueness. It was not a 
blind bargain. He was just as sure of the other life as 
of this. When he crossed the Great Divide he believed 
that the first person to greet him would be his Master. 
There wasn’t the shadow of the shadow of a doubt on 
that score. Death to the Apostle was not a “melting 
into the infinite azure.” It was not a going to “join 
the choir invisible.” Nor was it the absorption of the 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face to See” 13 


drop in the ocean. It was a clear, definite, pater 
eternal companionship with Jesus Christ. 

I recall the story of a physician who was visiting 
one of his patients. And as he was leaving, the sick 
man said: “Doctor, am I going to get well?’ The 
doctor was a Christian but he hesitated and said, “‘Well, 
you're a pretty sick man.” And the dying man took 
him by the hand and whispered, “I don’t want to die: 
tell me what lies on the other side.”” The doctor quietly 
answered, “My dear sir, I wish I could tell you but I 
do not know.” They talked for a moment about the 
mystery of it all, and then they bade each other 
good-by. As he opened the door to depart, a dog sprang 
into the room and leaped on him with delight. Turn- 
ing to the patient, the doctor resumed: “Did you ob- 
serve that? This is my dog. He has never been in 
this room before: he has never been in this house 
before. He did not know what was inside here. He 
knew nothing except that his master was here and so 
he jumped in without any fear. I cannot tell you 
what’s on the other side, but I know the Master is there 
—and that is enough. When He opens the door, I 
expect to pass in without fear to His presence.” Is 
there not a splendid lesson in that story? Heaven is 


where Jesus is. 0 


Then the Apostle’s conception of being with his Lord 
meant service. His whole idea of the hereafter was 
that it was to be a life of service. In nearly every 
letter he wrote he called himself the servant of Jesus 
Christ. He tried to serve Him here and he expected 
to serve Him there, day and night in His temple. 


14 When the Morning Wakens 


His hope was that Christ should be magnified in his 
body whether the magnifying was to be brought about 
by life or by death. Is it not possible that one reason 
why so many to-day are losing their grip on the future 
life is because of the crude imperfect notions of that 
life that have been entertained? In our childhood 
heaven was pictured to us as a dull, idle, lazy, dreamy 
existence. It was an oriental picture. There was 
nothing in it to fire the imagination or the ambition 
of a young life. It was a long, never-ending Sabbath 
of hymn singing and rest, a conception suited espe- 
cially for the aged. The whole idea was selfish, slug- 
gish, materialistic. Healthy young life would not have 
it. It did not appeal at all to the children, and remem- 
ber there are thousands of little children up there. It 
was not an interesting idea, nor a worthy one, nor a 
joyful one, for young virile manhood, It was, to say 
the least, unsatisfying. “I want to be an angel’ was 
a popular hymn some years ago. But then the average 
young person to-day doesn’t take particularly to being 
an angel. Man asks for a development of all his pow- 
ers. If the future life will not give us an opportunity 
for the expansion of all our best hopes, then much of 
our toil down here is meaningless. 

The Apostle’s heaven is not that kind of a heaven at 
all. It is not the heaven of the slothful who know 
no duty. It is a place of progress, of joyous intensity, 
a great activity of power and harmony and life. Doing 
all our work well and doing it with delight. “For me 
to live is Christ,” he says, and to die is Christ, too. 
It’s a remarkable saying, so far-reaching that it is 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face to See” 15 


difficult to crystallize it into a sentence. We fail to 
get the honey out of it until we realize that this life 
and the next life are one. They are the same life; the 
one is just the extension, the enlargement, the fulfill- 
ment of the other. For me to live is to know Christ, 
to love Him, to do His will, to win His approval, to 
be His law and impulse. Christ was the ruling passion 
of the man’s life. He had won him over body and 
heart and mind and soul and strength. 

Dr. Van Dyke has a book which he calls “The Rul- 
ing Passion.”” But as Henry Drummond was so fond 
of saying, every life has its ruling passion. Man must 
love something. It is a necessity of his being. The 
great Frenchman once said, “If I were cast ashore on 
a desert island, I would find something to appease the 
hunger of my heart. It might be a bird or a flower 
or a tree.” The heart of man cries out for some gov- 
erning affection. Once get hold of a man’s ruling 
incentive and you have the master key to his career. 
“A man has to live for something if it is only his 
stomach.” What, for instance, was the ruling passion 
of Peary’s life? To reach the North Pole, was it not? 
What was the ruling passion of Livingstone’s life? 
To help heal the open sore of the world. What of 
John Howard’s life? Prison reform. Or Lord 
Shaftesbury’s? Alleviating the woes of the poor. 
When Sir John Franklin was a young lad he walked 
twelve miles one day that he might see the ocean. 
And from that hour the land lost all its charm. He 
fell in love with the sea. Henceforth the sea was his 
passion. Some twenty years ago a Southern negro 


16 When the Morning Wakens 


wrote a book entitled “Up from Slavery.” The man 
had been born a slave. He did not even know his 
real name. He called himself Booker Washington. 
But as he grew up he was consumed with a burning 
thirst to get an education. He heard of Hampton and 
started out one day from his little shanty in West 
Virginia to walk there—a tramp of something like 
500 miles. He worked as a laborer along the way, 
slept on the sidewalk at night, lived on bread and water, 
and when he reached the promised land some three 
months later, he had fifty cents in his pocket. They 
looked him over, told him to go and clean a certain 
room, and Washington said to himself, “I’ll prove to 
these people that I mean business; I’ll make this room 
so clean that General Armstrong will want me to stay 
here.” The hunger of the man was to know; it was 
gnawing at his very vitals. 

What was the ruling passion of James Chalmers’ 
life? He went out to the South Sea Islands and in- 
vested it there. The narrative of his doings in New 
Guinea gives the reader the spinal chill He was 
eaten by the Fly River cannibals and so died a martyr 
to his faith, What on earth ever possessed him to 
throw his life away, as some call it, in such a hopeless 
adventure? The day I read his biography I didn’t 
sleep a wink that night—and you won’t either. That 
missionary mother, parting with her child at Calcutta, 
knelt on the deck of the steamer, saying, ““O Christ, 
I do this for Thee,” and then went back to the jungle 
to finish her work. \That was her ruling passion. It 
was Chalmers’ too.» As Tholuck used to say, “I have 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face to See” 17 


but one passion: it is He.’”’ There was a brilliant woman 
in Scotland. Her name was Susan Ferrier. She was 
a novelist. Some one asked her one day what her 
greatest wish was, and she answered, “My one wish 
is that my life may never lose its halo.’”’ That was 
beautifully put, was it not? The deepest cry of the 
human soul is, What is there worth living for? What 
is there worth dying for? As Tolstoi puts it: 


“What is there that I can commit myself to, of 
such a kind that even death does not daunt or dis- 
hearten me? What meaning can I put upon hfe 
—that will take the sting from sorrow and from 
even death itself?” 


Some one has said, “The bandit demands your money 
or your life, but Christ demands both.” 

But of course the really great thought that was in 
the Apostle’s mind was that no experience can be com- 
pared with the final joy of being with his Lord for- 
ever. No lesson was too hard, no path too lonely or 
rough, no weight too heavy, no grief too great—if 
they lead us into His presence, He felt that though 
he had nothing, yet he possessed all things. He cov- 
eted even suffering: “That I may know Him and the 
fellowship of His sufferings,’ he adds in the next 
chapter. Most of us are desirous to avoid suffering. 
The shadow of it is the cloud which we dread to enter. 
How many of us pray to be saved from it! But here 
is a man who longed to share the experiences of Christ’s 
sufferings ; the fellowship, he calls it. It was the man’s 


18 When the Morning Wakens 


consuming love. Real love yearns to share in the suf- 
ferings of the loved one. Look at that mother bending 
over her child. She listens to its sobs and moans, 
How she would love to take that pain and bear it! 
And the Apostle’s love for his Lord was so intense that 
he longed for fellowship in His sufferings. 

Now isn’t this a wonderful life-story? How every 
other impulse pales before it! —The man has a message 
and the message is graven into his very bones. It is 
not a picture he is looking at. It isn’t something from 
which he backs off and criticizes with cool and non- 
chalant detachment. It’s a reality within him, a fervor, 
a fire. He has one great certainty. A mighty convic- 
tion surged through his soul, eternal life with Jesus 
Christ. We are living to-day in an age of question; 
when everything is questioned. One can hardly pick 
up a volume that doesn’t try to disturb one’s faith. 
Half the books that are written are nothing but inter- 
rogation points. Many of them, it would seem, go out 
of their way purposely to slur and slap and slam the 
faith of our fathers. Instance after instance could be 
cited. Let us note just one: A book was published a 
year ago entitled “Garrulities of an Octogenarian.” 
The author has been all his life a publisher. He is now 
eighty-five years of age. When I looked up my dic- 
tionary I found that the meaning of that word gar- 
rulity is talking a lot on trivial things. And undoubt- 
edly after reading the book a good deal of it is trivial. 
But there are two or three chapters on religion, and 
surely religion is one of those subjects that ought to 
escape the trivial treatment. Anyway when a man 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face to See” 19 


passes the fourscore landmark he should be beyond 
the trivial stage. It is an old saying that whenever 
one starts out to describe Jesus Christ he always 
ends up by exposing himself, and usually does it un- 
consciously. Every effort to draw a picture of the 
Man of Nazareth results in the artist drawing his own 
portrait. 

Now listen to Mr. Holt’s creed. I quote his words: 
“T believe in some sort of a Power but it is neither 
all mighty nor all good. I believe Jesus Christ was 
God’s son just as you and I are, though in many re- 
spects much more to his father’s credit. As to the 
forgiveness of sins, we know there isn’t any. As 
to Christ’s burial and resurrection I have no opinion. 
If such a thing occurred I doubt if he was dead when 
he was entombed. As to the communion of saints, a 
good many people who I suppose would be included 
in that prevent my being anxious to join them. As 
to coming to judge the quick and the dead, we know 
that job is going on every day by a power mightier 
even than Christ’s,” and so on and so on. He cites 
with seeming sympathy the case of Mr. Carnegie, 
whom he familiarly calls Andy, telling him one day 
that he did not believe that such a man as Jesus 
Christ ever lived. And then he goes on to add, “I 
don’t know that it makes much difference whether 
he ever lived or not, so long as Andy without believ- 
ing it did so much good with his money.”’ And so the 
author with amazing assurance goes on to brush aside 
with a hop, skip and a jump the best scholarship, and 


20 When the Morning Wakens 


the best inheritance, and the best findings of the great- 
est minds of two thousand years of Christian history. 

Side by side with this let us place another confes- 
sion, and of a different kind. ( On the morning of 
Saturday, October 23, 1852, Daniel Webster re- 
marked, “I shall die to-night.” When evening came 
his family were round his bedside. His biographer 
Curtis was also present and took down his last words 
and recorded them for us: 


“My general wish on earth has been to do my 
Master’s will. That there is a God all must ac- 
knowledge. I see Him in all His wondrous 
works. Himself how wondrous! What would 
be the condition of any of us if we had not the 
hope of immortality? What ground is there to 
rest upon but the Gospel? There were scattered 
hopes of immortality among the Jews. There 
were intimations, crepuscular, twilight. But, but, 
thank God! The Gospel of Jesus Christ brought 
life and immortality to light, rescued it, brought 
it to life!’ “Then,” writes the biographer, “‘the 
greatest reasoner this country has produced caused 
a sacred hush to fall upon the dying chamber, 
while in a loud firm voice he repeated the Lord’s 
Prayer.” | 


~ Cecil Spring-Rice was the British Ambassador at 
Washington the first years of the World War. The 
night before he gave up his post on account of ill 
health, which was just one month before he died, sit- 


“But Sweeter Far Thy Face to See” 21 


ting in his study at Washington he wrote a little 
poem of two verses: 


“T vow to thee my country all earthly things above, 
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love— 
The love that asks no questions, the love that stands 

the test, 
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best; 
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, 
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice. 


and then in the second verse he goes on to give us 
the secret of his devotion to England: 


“But there’s another country I have heard of long ago, | 

Most dear to those who love her, most great to those | 

who know: | 

We may not count her army, we may not see her 
King; 

Her fulness is a faithful heart, her prize is suffering; 

And solemnly and silently her shining bands increase, 

Her ways are mays of pleasantness and all her paths 


3? 


are peace”) } 


Sir Cecil Spring-Rice’s devotion to his country was 
because deep down in his heart there was a loyal de- 
votion to that other country. He was a beautiful 
child-like Christian. How fitting that he should have 
passed on to his rich reward humming the lines of 
the familiar hymn: 


22 When the Morning Wakens 


“When the morning wakens, 
Then may I arise 
Pure and fresh and sinless 
In Thy holy eyes.” 


“So be my passing, 
My task accomplished and the long day done; 
My wages taken and in my heart 
Some late lark singing; 
Let me be gathered to the quiet West, 
The sundown splendid and serene.” 


II 


“Follow with Reverent Steps the Great 
Example” 


“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would 
that men should do to you, do ye even so to 
them.” 


Matthew 7 :12. 


LET us consider the moral ideas of Jesus. And let 
us put aside for a moment His doctrinal teachings, 
not in any way meaning thereby to minimize their 
importance but simply to limit the scope of our in- 
quiry. His doctrines have been discussed and quar- 
reled over for many hundreds of years; they have been 
denied and defended, and interpreted in a great many 
ways; but His moral sayings, His ethical teachings 
have had no challenge. I have never heard of any ill- 
tempered wrangle over His ethics. There has been 
almost complete unanimity on its essential facts from 
the first. These facts have been constant and un- 
changing. Even such a man as John Stuart Mill 
confessed that he knew no better way for a man to 
order his life than the way of Jesus. Could it be 
proven that His theological tenets were unsound, un- 

23 


24 When the Morning Wakens 


true, that there was no loving Heavenly Father, no 
future life, no forgiveness of sins, no virtue in prayer, 
it would still remain that the rules of conduct which 
He laid down are the only rules conceivable to make 
life truly successful and to make men truly happy. 
By unanimous consent Jesus is the supreme moral 
authority of the world. To use His own image, the 
man who conforms his life according to the laws of 
His Kingdom is building his house upon a rock. 

It is worth noting that even a man like Mr. Ber- 
nard Shaw admits this. In his preface to “Androcles 
and the Lion” we find these words: “I am no more 
a Christian than you are, gentle reader; yet like Pilate 
I prefer Jesus to Caiaphas and Annas, and I am ready 
to admit that after contemplating the world and human 
nature for more than sixty years, I see no way out of 
the world’s misery but the way of Christ, if He had 
undertaken the work of a practical statesman.” Indeed, 
Mr. Shaw is reported as having said that ‘“Christ’s 
name was the only one that came out of the world 
war with credit.” 

In studying the ethical teachings of our Lord, we 
find that His method was to lay down no definite sys- 
tem of rules but rather to state principles. Only on 
one subject, marriage, did the Master mark out any 
' definite line of action. The wisdom of this can be 
seen at a glance. Once make the Christian life con- 
sist in stated rules, and confusion and uncertainty are 
bound to follow. The rules, for one thing, will need 
to be multiplied and amplified as time goes on. New 
circumstances will call for addenda and new clauses 


“Follow With Reverent Steps” 25 


of interpretation. His teachings consist of great prin- 
ciples that are eternally valid. What He preached was 
a spirit. He did not deal with institutions but with 
life. We have a striking illustration of this in His 
attitude to slavery and political questions. When He 
lived on this earth more than half the people in the 
Roman Empire were slaves (perhaps two-thirds). 
Think of it! A large part of the wealth of Rome was 
in human beings. And yet never a word did He utter 
against the monstrous iniquity. What He did do was 
to lay down certain facts and inculcate a certain spirit 
that made slavery intolerable. One fact was the value 
of every human soul. A human life is not a piece of 
machinery nor a chattel but a child of God. 

And the same is true of science and art and culture 
and politics and industry. Christ has nothing to say 
directly about these things. And He has nothing to 
say because there can be no final message on these 
questions. They are changing all the time, and His 
appeal is to the unchanging. Different conditions call 
for different methods. At the beginning of His minis- 
try He said to the seventy, “Carry no purse.” But 
toward the end of it He said, “He that hath a purse 
let him take it, and likewise a wallet.’’ A particular 
precept may be for a particular occasion. Critics 
have tried to stir up warfare between His teaching 
and science. But this is unfair. His teaching is com- 
mitted to no scientific formula. It disentangles itself 
from science altogether. It must be free to expand 
with the expansion of learning. Each is supreme in 
its own domain. The spirit of His words is a spirit 


26 When the Morning Wakens 


of Faith and Love and Hope and Humility and Sacri- 
fice. And these things are preéminent no matter 
what one’s scientific creed may be. We may believe the 
earth is round or flat or oblong or hexagonal or square, 
the spiritual verities remain untouched. 

I. Now no one verse can cover all the field, but let us 
take the Golden Rule as our starting point because it 
embodies the first illustration of what we have in mind. 
And let us be quite free to confess that it is found 
in the codes of several ancient people (in China, 
India and Greece), but always in a negative form. 
The first great and noteworthy fact about the ethics 
of Jesus is its positiveness. His followers are to take 
the initiative in doing as they would desire to be done 
by. Every blessing that we covet for ourselves we 
must try and secure for others. A lady said to Dale of 
Birmingham, “I have been attending your church, Doc- 
tor, for three years and nobody has ever spoken to 
me.” She was a member too. She had been a mem- 
ber for three years and nobody had spoken to her. 
Well, of course that meant that she was equally guilty. 
She had never spoken to anybody herself. Suppose 
when you go down town to-morrow you only speak 
to those who speak to you first. The Golden Rule 
implies that we are to begin by doing our part. It 
is not sufficient to crawl into one’s own shell. We 
must do to our fellow men what we would wish them 
to do to us. We are to see things from the other 
person’s point of view. Some years ago a book was 
published entitled “Thinking Black.” It was written 
by Dan Crawford, a missionary in Africa. He had 


“Follow With Reverent Steps” 27 


lived for twenty years in the jungle and had learned 
to think black. He had learned to see things as the 
black man sees them. The Decalogue is mostly nega- 
tive, “Thou shalt not.” But negative morality never 
gets us very far. Ifa boy is forbidden to do a certain 
thing, that is the very thing that he is most determined 
to do. Tell him he must not skate on that particular 
sheet of ice and there is no sheet of ice between here 
and Hudson Bay so tempting. Forbidding things 
evokes antagonism Christ’s commands are positive, 
“Thou shalt.” For all the law is fulfilled in this ‘““Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy 
neighbor as thyself.” 

A great ethical teacher puts the law of Christ in this 
way, “Act so that you could wish your act to be uni- 
versal.” This was Kant’s great postulate. So act 
that you would be willing for every one to do the 
same thing under similar circumstances. A man is dis- 
honest. Suppose everybody were dishonest. He lies. 
Suppose everybody lied. He is two-faced. Suppose 
everybody were two-faced. If everybody were un- 
trustworthy for a month, what would become of com- 
merce? “I think I'll not go to church this morning.” 
Suppose everybody said that. Nothing but the Gol- 
den Rule of Christ will bring in the Golden Age of 
man—peace and brotherhood and goodwill. 

It has been disturbing to some people’s faith when 
they have learned that some of the sayings of Jesus 
were spoken long before by others. There is no longer 
any doubt of this, that He borrowed freely from other 
sources. But why should it be disquieting? It has 


28 When the Morning Wakens 


been shown how Shakespeare shows his debt to the 
past in nearly every play that he wrote. He borrows 
from Plutarch and Sophocles and Chaucer, and yet he 
is the supreme original genius of our race. There 
can be no originality in telling people to be good. 
Goodness is as old as Enoch. The great principles of 
the moral law are as old as the Decalogue, and older. 
If Jesus had spoken nothing but what was absolutely 
new, then His teaching (at least a large part of it) 
would necessarily have to be false. Because no really 
good man has ever lived who did not catch some fleet- 
ing glimpse of the laws of goodness. Men are mak- 
ing discoveries in science every day, but there are 
no discoveries in morals. For 1900 years no funda- 
mental article has been added to the moral code. If 
all truth is eternal, must not primitive man have known 
something about it? Paul speaks of “‘the law written 
in the heart.” John speaks of “the light that lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world.” The originality 
of Jesus is not simply in what He said. The idea of 
cardinal virtues is an old one. It goes back to Plato 
and Aristotle and Cicero. The Greeks had four cardi- 
nal virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Temperance and Jus- 
tice. Even the most barbarous races have some knowl- 
edge of moral duty. Christ recognized the authority 
of the knowledge that men already had. He assumed 
the ten commandments. He did not assert duties that 
were universally acknowledged. He began with men 
where He found them. There was no need to tell His 
hearers that it was wrong to steal. They knew that 
already. They knew that adultery was wrong. They 


“Follow With Reverent Steps” 29 


knew that murder was wrong. What He tried to im- 
press was that sensual thoughts were adulterous. Ab- 
solute originality in the realm of morals is an im- 
possible thing. 

II. Take another outstanding principle. Note the 
emphasis the Master places on Inwardness. Righteous- 
ness with Him was a question of Inwardness. “The 
very secret of the method of Jesus,” said Matthew 
Arnold, “is its inwardness.”’ The character of an 
act is determined entirely by its interior motive. The 
difference between a living thing and a non-living 
thing is that in a living thing there is a life force in- 
side directing its workings. In a machine the force is 
without but in a flower the force is within. The whole 
question of morality resolves itself to a right ordering 
of the inward life. Even good deeds of generosity and 
benevolence and kindness become worthless when done 
for ostentation and display and appearance. Right 
action must proceed from the heart. 

There are many ingenious instruments to-day for 
registering weights and measures. We have cash regis- 
ters and adding machines. There is the seismograph 
and the barometer and the automatic pen. We have gas 
meters and water meters and electric meters that are 
uncannily accurate. Here is a pair of scales. You 
can weigh a ton of coal on it but you can’t weigh a 
feather. In England the gold is always weighed. The 
Bank of England has a register so delicate that if 
you were to pull a hair out of your head and drop it 
on the scales it would turn the balance. But all this 
exactness and nicety is coarse and crude compared 


30 When the Morning Wakens 


with the balances of Jesus. Jesus said that adultery 
was a matter of the eye. A look can be adulterous. 
A feeling of hate can be murderous. 

It will be seen at a glance how perfectly revolutionary 
this was. One of the most drastic statements He ever 
made was when He said, “Not that which goeth into 
a man defileth him, but the things which come out of 
him these are the things which defile him.” Surely 
a most startling deliverance! Bear in mind that the 
vital things in His day were what one ate and drank. 
The ritual and the ethical were of equal moment. It 
was wrong to commit adultery: it was also wrong to 
violate the Sabbath or to eat with unwashed hands. 
By insisting on the letter, these religious teachers con- 
fused the important with the unimportant. They made 
the paying of tithes of mint and anise and cummin as 
essential as the weightier matters—Judgment and 
Mercy and Faith. But Jesus overturned all this. He 
said that kindness is more important than sacrifice 
and to love the Lord is greater than all burnt offer- 
ings. Indeed, it was this insistence on the moral as 
against the ceremonial that roused the enmity of the 
priests, and led them eventually to plot His death. 

III. Take another distinctive teaching of our Lord. 
Consider His ideas about non-resistance. They can 
be put perhaps into a single sentence—that it is al- 
Ways wrong to retaliate. And when we say retaliate 
we mean personally retaliate. When wrong is done 
to us personally, we are not to answer back with a 
similar wrong. Private revenge is superseded. ‘Ye 
have heard that it hath been said an eye for an eye 


“Follow With Reverent Steps” 31 


and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you that ye re- 
sist not evil.” And He is looking at the whole matter, 
let us keep before us, from the point of view of the 
individual. The point is not a wrong done to others 
(for defense of the feeble is one of His laws), but 
a wrong done to ourselves. Ifa man suffers an in- 
justice at the hands of his fellow man, he is not to 
answer it back by trying to get even, but rather con- 
trariwise by some act of kindness. ‘Love your ene- 
snies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that 
hate you.” If a man forgets his duty to you, you 
must not on that account forget your duty to him. In 
a word, we are never to fight the Devil with his own 
weapons. He who fights the Devil with his own weap- 
ons will most certainly get the worst of it. He can 
wield his weapons with so much more skill that no 
mortal opponent has the ghost of a chance. No use 
trying to overcome fraud with fraud or violence with 
violence. 

And anyway this is the lowest ground. If we lower 
ourselves to the level of those who wrong us, how 
can we possibly convey to them glimpses of a higher 
civilization? We cannot. The only weapon to fight 
the enemy with is a weapon bathed in Heaven. Use 
no blade that is not baptized. The Master’s originality 
cannot surely be criticized along this line. It may be 
true that He brought but little into the world that is 
really new, but one thing sure, His method of dealing 
with evil is startlingly new. When He came, the only 
way to treat evil was by reprisal. It was a tooth for a 
tooth. But for the mailed fist He substituted the 


32 When the Morning W akens 


pierced hand. Does anyone question the originality of 
this conception? It was a fresh and really virgin 
thought. 

IV. Consider still one more point—how Jesus 
rarely dwells on what we regard as the uglier vices and 
how the things that invite His scorn are the sins that 
we are tempted to look upon as minor. He was much 
more gentle than are we with sins of the flesh but 
He was much more severe with sins of the spirit. The 
sins He denounces most are not those of appetite or 
passion but those which involve insincerity and double 
dealing. How unsparing He was with pride and 
bigotry and hypocrisy and anger and envy and evil 
speaking! Indeed, with Him pride seems to have been 
the cardinal offense. It is the first of the seven deadly 
sins. It is the great obstacle to the progress of the 
soul. He said that publicans and harlots would enter 
the Kingdom before the scribes and Pharisees. Dante 
has a list of the seven deadly sins as they are called 
and pride tops the list. The lowest circle in the Pur- 
gatorio is where the proud are. The desire to be seen 
of men! The ambition to shine—how common it is! 
But our Lord, although He was equal with God, made 
Himself of no reputation. He taught that the great- 
est are the humblest. The greater the scholar, the 
humbler he is in mind. The greater the saint, the 
humbler in spirit. And insincerity! How severe He 
was on the insincere man! Sincerity, as Jesus under- 
stood it, meant that all our motives can stand the most 
searching light. 

Or consider the gravity of evil-speaking. We think 


“Follow With Reverent Steps” 33 


this a small matter, but according to Jesus it is a very 
serious and grave offense. ‘Whosoever shall say to 
his brother Raca shall be in danger of the council, but 
whosoever shall say Thou fool shall be in danger of 
the Gehenna of fire.” Or consider the sin of omission. 
We count it a very little matter. Not so He. When 
before the throne of the Great Judge shall be gathered 
all nations, it is rather startling that the Judge says 
nothing of lying or stealing or hate or murder. Those 
whom He condemns are those whose lives are barren 
of good. With Him respectable sin is the great sin— 
selfishness, jealousy, malice, pride, indifference, hard- 
heartedness. The virtues He values most are humility, 
sincerity, fidelity. The man who is going to win the 
ultimate favor of God is the faithful man. We are 
fitting ourselves here for larger responsibilities in the 
future if we are only faithful. The greatness of any 
work is not the important thing, but the love and 
fidelity with which it is performed. 

V. Or once again and finally, note His teachings 
concerning property. This is one place where we want 
to be dead sure we are right. Because it is an ex- 
tremely serious matter to believe that the Master 
teaches a theory of life which in everyday routine we 
are unable, and indeed have no intention of trying, to 
put into practice. This is the way religion often loses 
its reality and that is about the worst thing that can 
happen to it. Christ had much to say on the subject 
of property. The great mass of people to-day it would 
seem regard the acquiring of property as the chief good. 
Jesus looks upon it as one of the difficult things in our 


34 When the Morning Wakens 


upward climb for higher things. He nowhere de- 
nounces the possession of property as intrinsically 
wrong. His whole attitude is the power of earthly 
things to hamper and block us in our search for the 
better life. The great peril of property is its distract- 
ing power. It makes difficult a living trust in God. If 
we would only insist on putting spiritual things first 
there would be no danger, but herein lies the whole 
stubborn difficulty. Property has an insidious way of 
pushing itself into the supreme place. The whole atti- 
tude of Jesus is not what we have, but what we are is 
the great thing. Wealth is a means of living—not an 
end. “The life is more than meat and the body more 
than raiment.” 

It is significant that so much of His teaching is 
taken up with stewardship. The reason being that 
it is such a splendid test of cHaracter. It affords men 
an opportunity for converting their possessions into 
soul collateral. So it is a tool to be used for higher 
ends. It is not given us for display or for indulgence. 
When we use it in that way we miss the true mean- 
ing and scope of life. Property is a sacred thing, It 
is a trust. To possess it cannot be wrong. It is a gift 
for the development of the inner life. It is an oppor- 
tunity for service. Communism and socialism have 
no place in His teaching. We are tested by the use 
we make of our possessions. ‘Make to yourselves 
friends of the unrighteous mammon.”’ It is called un- 
righteous by metonymy because it is so often abused. 
All the same, by making wise use of it we can con- 
vert it into something that is satisfying and enduring. 


“Follow With Reverent Steps” 35 


In the parable of the talents the man who doubles his 
apportionment was praised. “Well done, good serv- 
ant.” The man who wrapt his pound in a napkin 
was condemned. “Thou wicked and slothful servant.” 
If we are not faithful in our use of material things, 
who is going to commit to us the true riches? Fidelity 
in the inferior trust is a test of fidelity in greater mat- 
ters. Wealth is placed in our hands to be used for 
God. 


“So shall the wide earth seem our Father’s temple, 
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.” 


III 


“Tf I Still Hold Closely to Him” 


“Ye shall be sorrowful but your sorrow 
shall be turned into joy.” 
John 16:20 


Sorrow is the appointed lot of man. “Ye shall 
be sorrowful,” says Jesus. He was Himself a sorrow- 
ful man. No one can pass this way and be made im- 
mune from sorrow. Sorrow is implicit in the very 
scheme of things. There are undoubtedly great 
islands of joy but they are all washed by the greater 
ocean of sorrow. ‘For man is born to sorrow as the 
sparks fly upwards.” 

Sorrow is not physical; it is mental. It is the pain 
of the mind. When we speak of suffering we usually 
mean physical suffering, but there is a suffering far 
deeper and keener and sharper than anything the body 
knows. It is the suffering of the mind, of the con- 
science, of the heart And this alone is real sorrow. 
Think of the pain that comes from a sense of having © 
failed, of being a disappointment to one’s friends. 
Think of the grief that comes to parents when their 
children are wayward. Think of the anguish of a 
mother whose child is born defective, the suffering of 

36 


“Tf I Still Hold Closely to Him” 37 


love. How her tender heart is wrung! Consider the 
suffering that arises from a consciousness of having 
been treated unjustly, of having been wronged. Why 
should Desdemona of all women be chosen to suffer 
for Iago’s villainy? Or instance the torment that 
results from the stings of conscience, from having 
done injustice to others. Some kindly soul believed in 
you and you betrayed them. That wound refuses to 
heal. Every little while it opens afresh and the nerve 
hurts, as if some one were dropping acid into the sore. 
Consider the unhappiness that springs from marital 
troubles to-day, and so often borne in silence, the in- 
fidelities, the neglects, the cruelties, the temperamental 
misfits. Of course one might go on for hours to speak 
of the suffering that follows affliction and bereavement 
and the loss of dear ones. Oh, if we could but call them 
back and tell them we are sorry for what we did do or 
did not do. But of this anon. 

* Then there are the tragedies that can be traced to 
passion and ignorance and jealousy and mistake. The 
great tragedies of literature are nearly all founded on 
passion and jealousy and mistake. Here’s Hamlet 
and Othello and Macbeth and King Lear. How well 
Shakespeare understood this! And Sophocles too! It 
has often been noted how most of the tragedies of 
Sophocles are founded on some mistake or other. Here 
is that tale that George Kennan tells in his book on 
Siberia. It is the story of a young physician who was 
unjustly accused of some disloyalty during the World 
War and so was exiled by the Russian government 
to the northern part of Siberia. His young wife at 


38 When the Morning Wakens 


the time was expecting a child. When the child was 
born she left the little thing with her mother and 
started out to join her husband in the far Northland. 
She knew the name of the town to which he was ban- 
ished but nothing more. It was several thousand miles 
distant. For three long months she traveled in the 
most primitive fashion, part of the way on reindeer 
sleds, going for whole days without food and nights 
without sleep, until the hardship and the hunger and 
the strain and the storm almost blew her courage out. 
But still she pressed on. The hope of soon meeting 
her husband sustained her. Now she did not know 
there were two towns of the same name in Siberia, in 
one of which her husband was a prisoner. And the 
towns are 3,000 miles apart. Who can conceive the 
little wife’s crushing blow when she entered the town 
after a three months’ journey such as that, to be told 
it was the wrong place and that her husband was just 
as far away as when she started? And is it to be won- 
dered that the shock was so great that she broke un- 
der the strain, breathing her last breath away in the 
frozen North, 3,000 miles from her babe on the one 
side and her husband on the other. The heart is a vital 
organ. One may break a bone and no great injury 
be done. The bone will mend. But when the heart is 
broken the injury is mortal. 

Now the thought arises, what is the Christian way 
to meet sorrow? What should be the attitude of a man 
who accepts the authority and teaching of Jesus Christ? 
And in order to lead up to that thought let us ask 
ourselves what are some of the other ways. What 


“If I Still Hold Closely to Him” 39 


do the philosophers propose? What do those teachers 
advise who do not have the comfort of religion? Let 
us glance at their counsel briefly. 

Well, to begin with, there is the attitude of Forget- 
fulness. Strive as speedily as possible to forget your 
trouble, many are telling us. Anything that will drug 
the memory and dope the feelings is wise and prudent. 
Here is a mourner in the hour of bereavement. What 
does she do? Perhaps she rushes into society. Per- 
haps she decides on travel. Her friends say to her, 
“Time and new surroundings will help forget. By 
and by the burden will grow lighter. You will be- 
come accustomed to it. The face you miss will after a 
while grow dim.” But is not this a very bitter kind of 
medicine? How the noble soul rejects it! How the 
true heart cries: “I do not want such consolation. It 
hurts more than it heals. I do not want to forget 
my dear one. I would rather go on remembering for- 
ever, even if the memory brings pain.’’ Consolation 
of this kind always seems such a terrible deliverance. 
It is the comfort that Job’s friends brought to him. 
It does not answer the cry from the depths. There 
must be a diviner answer to sorrow than this. There 
must be some precious lesson in it all. We cannot at 
least help hoping that our dead are alive with God. 
And if alive, surely we ought not to try to forget them. 
Rather should we strive to keep their memory green. 
We ought to read their old letters and treasure the old 
tender impressions. How often we witness members 
of a family drifting apart! Would they be nearly so 


40 When the Morning Wakens 


apt to do so if they labored more diligently to fan 
the embers of a dying flame? 

Then there is the blessing of Work. To get im- 
mersed in some great noble task has often proven it- 
self a marvelous anodyne. To be so busy about one’s 
daily duties that every other solicitude is crowded out. 
It will be remembered how it was this that saved John 
Bright in his hour of despair. Even the consciousness 
that one is able to do something worth while is a great 
elixir. Trouble is so apt to crush us and make us feel 
that maybe our work is done, that perhaps we are in- 
competent and unnecessary and useless any more. Un- 
fortunately a good many cures for the troubles of 
the world to-day start from the postulate that labor is 
a curse. There is a perfect deluge of books being 
published just now on Socialism, and the burden of 
most of them is that labor is an evil thing. But the 
root idea is false. Contrariwise, we are gradually 
learning what a blessing is work. A Labor Union 
delegate once became angry with Ex-President Eliot 
and wrote him a letter saying he hoped something ter- 
rible would happen to him so that he would have to 
work hard all the rest of his life. Dr. Eliot wrote 
back expressing his thanks and saying that nothing 
more welcome could come his way. There is nothing 
so intolerable to an earnest, healthy man as idleness. 
Ours is a world literally soaked in action. It is the 
safety valve of millions. Labor is humanity’s great- 
est friend. Apart from spiritual considerations, it 
brings to us our richest blessings. 

Consider too the joy of ministering to others. So 


“Tf I Still Hold Closely to Him” “41 


often one’s trouble fills him with self-pity, and just 
to be able to get out of this attitude of looking on 
oneself with compassion and to be able to look at the 
needs of others is a great and soothing antidote. There 
is a quaint proverb in Japan that, “When you dig an- 
other out of trouble, the hole from which you lift him 
becomes the place where you bury your own sorrow.” 
This is the theme of Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem “The 
Light of Asia.” He tells of a mother who had lost 
her child and who had gone to a well-known saint, 
beseeching him to come to her solitude and give her 
back her darling. And the saint replied, “Go out, 
my dear woman, into the world and find a home where 
there is less sorrow than yours, and then come back 
and repeat your request.”’ So forth she started on her 
quest, and after long wandering returned, and when 
the saint welcomed her, she said in effect: “Oh, man 
of God, I have wandered everywhere, but I have found 
no such home. I still want my child, but I want more 
the power to help others.” 

Still once more there is the attitude of resignation. 
How common it is to hear people who are down in the 
depths say, “Well, I suppose I must be resigned. I 
suppose I shall have to grin and bear it. Looks after 
all as if that’s the only thing left to do.” It is cer- 
tainly not a very victorious way to meet the enemy. 
To be sure it is better to strive for this than not to 
strive for anything. But at best is it not a very nega- 
tive attainment? Is it not apt to be a sign of help- 
less, unwilling surrender? Miss Elliott describes this 
mood in her hymn ‘‘Thy will be done.” The hymn is 


42 When the Morning Wakens 


beautiful and tender but it is not the idea that Jesus 
had when He taught us His great prayer. It is a 
sweet and precious lyric for the hour of bereavement 
but thank the Good Father life is not all bereavement. 
Life too is resolution and achievement and accom- 
plishment. Furthermore, the ills that trouble us are 
not always the will of God. So many of them are the 
direct antithesis of His will. Jesus taught His dis- 
ciples to say, “Thy will be done” not Thy will be en- 
dured. We are to do His will not merely to put up 
with it. There are times when it is disloyal to be re- 
signed. We must never be resigned to evil condi- 
tions. Our eternal business here is to correct them. 
But all these answers are only partial. Not one is 
absolutely satisfying. None promise complete fulfill- 
ment. The only answer that brings perfect peace to 
the soul is the promise of Jesus: to transform our sor- 
row, and to turn the enemy into a friend. To say to 
oneself, let sorrow come; it will be hard, I know, 
but it can be transformed. We can gain from it a 
spiritual victory. It is an opportunity to develop 
spiritual heroism—that is the real mastery. It is as if 
one were sailing on a river and, coming to its mouth 
suddenly, found how it opened out upon the ocean. 
How constantly nature witnesses to this wondrous 
miracle, for is it not indeed a miracle? Here is a 
coarse, bitter, shriveled, unattractive seed and yonder 
is a bed of black soil. I bring seed and soil together 
and soon there springs up a blade, a bud, a flower, a 
lovely daffodil. It is nature’s perpetual triumph— 
turning the colorless into color, the bitter into the 


“Tf I Still Hold Closely to Him” 43 


sweet, the ugly into the beautiful. It is like the flowers 
in your garden. They are of every tint and every hue 
but they all come from the green leaf. We very rarely 
see a green flower and we very rarely see anything else 
but a green leaf. And yet the flower comes out of the 
leaf. It is made out of the leaf. The leaf is the fun- 
damental thing. 

Perhaps this truth is nowhere more clearly seen 
than in the world of art. When Wordsworth began 
to write poetry how the critics laughed! They said 
that poetry could not be made out of such common 
things, but Wordsworth took these very common things 
and glorified them. Likewise Burns. He selects an 
old bridge and an old mare, or two dogs, or two jolly 
beggars, or a mouse, or a daisy, and “shapes them into 
measures of magic.’”’ What an insignificant village is 
Thrums! Its streets are narrow and dirty. Its dwell- 
ings are poor and humble. It is the home of simple 
Scotch weavers, whose daily task is one of drudgery. 
But Barrie takes you to a window in that little vil- 
lage and points out what is going on from day to day, 
and as you look you see greater things than Homer 
ever saw around the walls of Troy. 

Browning has a short poem entitled “Confessions.” 
It is the story of a dying man. The room is full of 
medicine bottles and the odor of drugs. A clergyman 
calls to see him and talk with him about this vale of 
tears and his future hopes. He says, “Reverend sir, I 
have not found it a vale of tears. It has treated 
me well. It has been a garden of happiness with a 
love lane in it. These bottles are a symbol. To you 


44, When the Morning Wakens 


they may smell of ether, to me they smell of roses. To 
your eyes things may look blue, but to mine it is the 
blue of heaven. To mine it serves for ‘the old June 
weather, blue above lane and wall.’ ” 


“What is he buzzing in my ears 
Now that I come to die? 
Do I view the world as a vale of tears? 
Ah, Reverend sir, not I.” 


It is a parable of human life. There is nothing 
that cannot be reclaimed. As beauty can be evolved 
out of mud, so joy can be built out of medicine bottles. 
Is there anything more interesting than to watch the 
transmutation of something barren into something 
beautiful—it may be a swamp or a marsh or a waste 
product or a human soul? In the South of France 
there is a tract of land that was at one time a desert. 
North of the desert and divided from it by a range of 
limestone hills rolled the river Durance charged with 
fertilizing mud. A channel was cut through the hills 
and the waters turned in, and now the wilderness blos- 
soms as the rose. In “Martin Chuzzlewit,”’ a section 
of our own country which Dickens satirizes as a 
worthless morass is now a prosperous fertile state. 
Once a land of desolation, it is to-day part of the 
granary of the world. Here’s Miami, Florida’s magic 
city. Thirty years ago it was little better than a 
quagmire of stagnant water. It was a mangrove 
jungle, the home of the rattlesnake and the alligator. 
It had less than 100 inhabitants. But the mangrove 


“If I Still Hold Closely to Him” 45 


was Cleared, the swamp was drained, the lowland was 
filled in. And to-day it is a city of boulevards and parks 
and beautiful homes. “Blessed indeed are they who 
make beauty to spring up in the waste places.” 
Everything can be redeemed. Even sorrow can. 
The transfiguration of the ordinary is the extraordi- 
nary. ‘Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” Not 
your sorrow shall be followed by joy! ‘Turned into 
it.’ The joy is going to be the sorrow metamorphosed. 
“The sword is going to be beaten into a plowshare.” 
And it is not a future alchemy either. Some look 
upon religion as a life insurance policy payable at 
death. But not so. Religion operates on the endow- 
ment plan. One of the greatest mistakes is to suppose 
that Christianity has no victory in this life. That it 
is a mere shelter in the time of storm. Contrariwise, 
it is a good staunch boat in which to weather the storm 
and bring us safely into the harbor with banners flying. 
Accept your sorrow as the will of God and it will 
become a joy now. The oyster turns the piece of shale 
into a pearl. “He turneth the shadow of death into 
the morning.” It is a great spiritual truth that sor- 
row rebelled against embitters, but sorrow accepted 
can become the most enriching experience in human 
life. It transfigures everything with a golden splendor. 
There is a tavern in the North of Scotland with a 
painting on the wall by Landseer and the story of that 
painting has often been told. How one evening a com- 
pany of men were in the smoking room, Sir Edwin 
Landseer being one of the company. In opening a 
bottle of soda water the cork flew out and the con- 


46 When the Morning Wakens 


tents splashed the newly painted wall, causing a perma- 
nent stain. But next day the great painter took a 
piece of charcoal and converted the stain into the pic- 
ture of a waterfall, with stags drinking, and copse 
and heather all about. The blot was transformed into 
a thing of beauty, and to-day tourists from all over the 
world visit this old inn to see what is really a work 
of art. It is the same idea that George Eliot works 
into “Middlemarch,” when she describes a blot of ink 
dropping on a handkerchief and apparently ruining it. 
But some one took the lace and began to embroider 
round the blot till soon she incorporated it into a beau- 
tiful design. 

Have you not sometimes watched a little sloop put 
out to sea? Wind and tide are full against her, but 
she tacks from side to side and with every tack gains 
headway. Onward she goes, slowly but surely, always 
forging forward. She reminds one of some birds— 
the pheasant, for instance—that always mount as they 
fight. 

This then is the secret of the Master’s promise, “Ye 
shall be sorrowful but your sorrow shall be turned into 
joy.” God often leads His children into dark places 
in order to see the stars. We learn after a while 
that it is really possible to see in the dark. When you 
are taken into a dark room, at first everything is black. 
But after a little the eye adapts itself to new conditions. 
Human nature sees no light in the grave, but to Peter 
and John it was flooded with light. If you have read 
the story of James Hannington’s march to Uganda, 
you will recall that as soon as he drew near to the 


“If I Still Hold Closely to Him” 47 


seat of government, he was seized. “I felt,” he says, 
“that I was being dragged away to be murdered but I 
sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.’’’ The last entry 
in his diary reads as follows: “It is my eighth day 
in prison. I can hear no news but I am being held up 
by the 30th Psalm, which comes with great power.” 
Now the 30th Psalm is a singing psalm. Its closing 
sentence reads: “Thou hast turned for me my mourn- 
ing into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth and 
girded me with gladness.” The next day two men 
sent by the king came to kill him. He stood up before 
them and told them he was glad to give his life. He 
was only 38. To-day a great cathedral marks the spot 
where he fell. And the best part of it all is that some 
years later the son went out to take his father’s place. 
And even that is not the best part of the sequel either. 
For that son welcomed into the church the very man 
that put to death his father. 

Edward Rowland Sill tells of a coward who flung 
away his sword in the thick of battle, declaring it to be 
no good. But the king’s son saw the cast-away 
weapon, sprang forward and seized it and then went 
forth with it to win a great and glorious victory: 


“This I beheld—or dreamed it in a dream: 
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain; 
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged 
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords 
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner 
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. 
A. craven hung along the battle’s edge, 


48 When the Morning Wakens 


And thought: ‘Had I a sword of keener steel,— 
That blue blade that the king’s son bears,—but this 
Blunt thing !’—he snapt and flung it from his hand, 
And lowering crept away and left the field. 

Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead, 
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, 
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, 

And ran and snatched it, and, with battle shout 
Lifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down 

And saved a great cause that heroic day.” 


And perhaps Maltbie Babcock’s lines are even bet- 
isd 


“Rest in the Lord my soul; 
Commit to Him thy way. 
What to thy sight seems dark as night, 
To Him is bright as day. 


“Rest in the Lord my soul; 
He planned for thee thy life, 
Brings fruit from rain, brings good from pain, 
And peace and joy from strife.” 


IV 


“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” 


“Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom.” 
Genesis 13:12 


“Daniel opened his windows toward Jeru- 
lem.” 


Daniel 6:10 


THESE verses are taken from two familiar stories. 
One man is returning from Egypt where he had grown 
rich in cattle and silver and gold. He is looking round 
for a place to settle and make a home for his family 
and the site he selects is in the neighborhood of Sodom. 
Sodom, it will be remembered, was one of the cities 
in the fertile valley of Siddim. It stands in the Bible 
as the symbol of wickedness and shame. 

But Lot shut his eyes to that. He was an oppor- 
tunist. He conferred with Mr. Worldly Wiseman. 
He felt that it would be to his advantage not to be 
far away from such a prosperous growing town. And 
so he conveniently overlooked the risks for a little 
gold. He sacrificed the highest part of his nature for 
the lowest, and any man who does that is a loser every 
time, even if he makes gilt-edged returns on his invest- 

49 


50 When the Morning Wakens 


ment. It was certainly a beautiful picture that Lot 
looked upon that day—a very garden of the Lord, but 
there is a dark background to the picture. For a few 
years later we read how Abraham arose early one morn- 
ing and cast his eye over the rich valley where his 
nephew dwelt and lo! the smoke of the land went up 
as the smoke of a furnace. 

The other man is in Babylon, Babylon the great, 
Babylon the magnificent, one of the oldest cities in 
Mesopotamia, the seat of debauchery and vice, the 
Sodom of the Chaldean Empire. He is a prisoner 
there too and in peril of his life. The royal decree 
had gone forth to worship the golden image. The 
King had set it out on the campus in commemoration 
of one of his victories—a huge thing go feet high, 18 
wide—and commanded all the people to bow down 
and worship it, adding that if any rebel refused he 
would be cast into a furnace. According to another 
edict men were forbidden to pray for thirty days. 
They must ask no petition of any god or man save 
Darius. But notwithstanding this peril and this royal 
ultimatum, Daniel went into his house and kneeled in 
prayer and kept his windows open toward Jerusalem. 
The man was homesick for the Holy City and the 
Hills of God. A prominent divine tells us that when 
he was a student at Oxford many years ago one of the 
Professors there was dying of cancer. The dying 
man was a native of Iceland and his constant cry was 
that he might get back to see the snow again in his 
native land. The hills of his Iceland home were call- 
ing him. 


“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” 51 


One of the familiar sights in Moslem lands is the 
Mohammedan on his knees. Five times daily he pros- 
trates himself with his face toward Mecca, the birth- 
place of the prophet. These several times are an- 
nounced by the muezzins from the minarets of the 
mosques. If he is journeying across the desert seated 
on his camel, when the sun sinks below the level 
waste, he dismounts and spreads his little carpet on 
the sand and kneels in the direction of the great 
Mosque. No matter where he may chance to be, this 
act of reverence is never forgotten. In every part 
of the Arab world, at the same hour, 230 million 
Mohammedans are bowing their heads toward the same 
sacred shrine. It is a most impressive sight. 

So here we have two stories of pitching a tent and 
opening a window. There may not seem to be much 
connection between them. Let us see. A Tent! What 
is a tent? Originally, the Hebrews like the Arabs 
were a people living in tents. They were nomads. 
Their wealth was in cattle and flocks. A herdsman 
is of necessity a tent dweller and not till he becomes 
an agriculturist does he build a shelter of a more 
substantial character. The tent is a symbol of im- 
permanence. Man is a pilgrim. We have embodied 
the thought in one of our hymns: 


“Here in the body pent 
Absent from Him I roam, 
And nightly pitch my moving tent 
A day’s march nearer home.” 


52 When the Morning Wakens 


And then a window! What is a window? Win- 
dows are the eyes of the house. Without windows 
what are we but cave men? “But for windows,” says 
Hilaire Belloc, “we should have to go outside to see 
daylight.” Life is full of windows. Some of the 
greatest blessings of life come to us through our win- 
dows. These windows may be plain and unpreten- 
tious, but Oh! the outlook they give! Bob Burdette 
the humorist used to delight to take his visitors to the 
large window in his library and say, ‘Come and see 
my million dollar painting.” Approaching, the visitor 
would look out upon the orange groves of Pasadena, 
with the San Gabriel Mountains behind towering 5,000 
feet into the clouds—a truly wonderful picture. 

What a window is our Bible! It is a telescope, but 
many do not use it as a telescope is intended to be 
used. They analyze it, scrutinize it, note the different 
parts of which it is composed; they swing it around, 
adjust it. They keep polishing the mirror, but they 
never look through it. They forget that the impor- 
tant thing about a telescope is not the instrument it- 
self but what the instrument reveals. A man may be 
so busy chopping down trees and counting the chips 
that he misses the glory of the forest all about him. 
To the spiritual man the Bible is the most interesting 
window in the world: to the unspiritual man it is one 
of the dullest and tamest. 

Or think of the wonderful window we call Nature, 
another Bible and older than the book we prize and 
love. Unfortunately some look at this Bible and see 
nothing but the sash and the panes and the putty. 


“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” 53 


Others look through it and behold the very glory of 
the Lord. Shakespeare in “As you like it’ says, 
“There are tongues in trees, sermons in stones.” But 
alas! lots of people only see the trees and the stones. 
Carlyle thought that the only value the Sun possessed 
for some folks was that it was a saving on their gas 


bill. 


“Two men looked out of the prison bars, 
The one saw mud, the other saw stars.” 


The man who is blind to the wonder and glory of 
spring, who can look at the mountains and see nothing 
but rocks to be dynamited and ore to be mined, who 
can stand before the great oaks of Dodona and say, 
“What fine boards and shingles there are here,”’ who 
can gaze at the waterfall and see only power to turn 
the wheels of industry, is not a spiritually minded 
man—he has blurred and stained the mirror of the 
soul in which God meant the divinity of Nature to be 
revealed: 


“A primrose by the river’s brim, 
A yellow primrose was to him 
And it was nothing more.” 


Or think of Prayer! What a window is Prayer! 
What a vision it can unveil! Or sorrow! What a 
blessed window is sorrow! How oftentimes it opens 
up a vista of ineffable delight. Once when George 
McDonald was in deep trouble he wrote a letter to his 
wife, in which he used these words: “My windows 
are all darkened except the skylight.” ‘I’ve been to 


54 When the Morning Wakens 


Communion this morning,” one saint said to me. “I 
did not hear a word of the sermon. My hearing is poor 
and anyway I tried not to listen. It makes me nervous. 
I just kept looking through that sacred window.” To 
her the Holy Supper was a window. 

I passed a lad yesterday on his way to school. He 
was absorbed in a book and picking his steps as he 
stumbled half blindly along. I said, “That book must 
be mighty interesting.” He said, “It sure is.” I 
glanced at the title. It was one of Joseph Conrad’s 
stories. He was out upon a ship at sea pitching and 
rolling with the vessel. He will have a new pair of 
eyes by the time he gets to school. Keats speaks 
of “magic casements,”’ but Chesterton adds, “Why all 
casements are magic casements.” Truly indeed some 
of the greatest blessings of life come to us through 
our windows. Religion is not primarily believing 
something but seeing something. It is the opening 
of the eyes. The spiritual man is the man who sees. 
“Except a man be born again he cannot see the King- 
dom of God.’ “Whereas I was blind now I see.” 
The mystics of the world are the men who sit by the 
inner windows in a brown study and look not out but 
in upon the experiences of the soul. It was a simple 
ritual Daniel performed when he threw open that win- 
dow but it helped turn his soul away from seductive 
Babylon to the Holy City that he loved and to the God 
of his fathers. Maybe his eyes looked far afield 
on a vast sweep of country with the uplands in the 
distance and he could say with the Psalmist: “I to 
the hills will lift mine eyes.” 


“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” 55 


But the important thing in these verses is not the 
tent or the window. There is another word that sees 
farther and reaches down deeper. “Lot pitched his 
tent toward Sodom.” “Daniel opened his windows to- 
ward Jerusalem.” Lot cannot be blamed for seeking 
a place where there was good pasture for his flocks. 
That was the sensible thing to do, other things being 
equal. The whole significance of the story lies in 
the direction which he was surveying. It was not the 
pasture that was the important thing; it was the neigh- 
borhood. He pitched his tent toward Sodom. He 
was thinking more of his cows than of his children. 

So that the great vital question to ask oneself is, 
Which way is my life leaning? Which way is it 
fronting, and likely drifting? The important thing is 
not what we are doing but whither we are tending. 
The first step toward doing wrong is looking that way. 
A deed such as pitching a tent or opening a window 
may be very trifling and yet it may be momentous with 
meaning. It may be a step toward degradation or a 
move toward the King’s Highway. Men do not take 
the journey to Sodom at a bound. They approach it 
by stages. Judge every act by the way it is headed 
whether it succeeds in reaching its terminal or not. 
If it is headed toward Sodom, condemn it. If it is 
pointing toward Jerusalem, commend it, encourage it, 
in the hope that it may ultimately arrive. The matter 
of spiritual health and disease is often just a question 
of facing the right or wrong way. The most impor- 
tant question a man can ask himself is not, what do I 
believe? but, Which way am I inclining? Because it is 


56 When the Morning Wakens 


only a question of time, if a man is fronting in the 
wrong direction, when he will reach the wrong goal. 
In the very next chapter do we not read, “And they 
took Lot who dwelt in Sodom and his goods and de- 
parted.” Lot, it will be noted, is no longer in the 
neighborhood of Sodom but right inside its walls. “He 
dwelt there.” He was not toward Sodom nor near 
Sodom but in Sodom. He had drifted in. So the 
test question is, What am I looking at? What am I 
hoping for? Which way is my life slanting? Is 
there any Holy City in my soul to which I turn in 
prayer? The author of the letter to the Hebrews says, 
“Let us run, looking unto Jesus.” And the sorry part 
of the whole story is the finale to it all. Lot dwelt in 
Sodom twenty years and at the end of that time ten 
righteous souls could not be assembled. What a sad 
commentary after residing for twenty years in a town 
that ten righteous people could not be found in it. 
Even his own family had become Sodomites. 

A great preacher has a sermon in one of his books 
and the title of the sermon is “Righteousness a direc- 
tion.” His idea being that we cannot always map out 
a clear dividing line between what is right and what is 
wrong. Who, for instance, can lay his finger on the 
precise point where taking thought for the morrow 
becomes a sin? We all know that every wise, sensible 
parent must take some thought for the morrow, only 
there is a point where it becomes sinful, where anxiety 
becomes worry. Or who can locate the very point 
where self-respect becomes pride? This is the idea 
at the root of the Latin word trespass, that every sin 


“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” 57 


consists in crossing some dividing line. But the defini- 
tion is a partial one. Because sin does not always con- 
sist in crossing any line into some actually forbidden 
field. There is a large territory of truth in which it 
is impossible to draw any such line. The teaching of 
Christ goes much deeper. According to Him, sin 
starts in a longing look toward the forbidden country. 
It is not a mere matter of rules and chalk lines. Sin 
is not an act but an attitude. He who wishes to sin 
has sinned already. “That the caged panther does not 
pounce on you does not prove him docile. He likely 
would if he could.” So if my heart’s desire is to do 
wrong, then I’ve done wrong already; if to be good, 
then I am good. What a man longs to be, that he is 
in the eyes of Heaven. God takes the will for the 
deed. When a great purpose came to David, a pur- 
pose which he was not permitted to carry out, God said 
to him, “Thou didst well that it was in thine heart.” 
In one of Kipling’s poems the angels wave their flags 
of welcome to the dreamer whose dreams come true, 
but in David’s case God is applauding the dreamer 
whose dream does not come true. There is a beati- 
tude for those who are pure in heart, but let us not 
forget that there is also a beatitude for those who 
hunger and thirst after purity of heart. For no man, 
I take it, is righteous in God’s sight who has not a pure 
heart. 

And this thought throws a beam of light on that 
verse in John’s Epistle which says that “Whatsoever 
is born of God sinneth not.” In other words, when 
a sinner experiences the new birth the drift of his life 


58 When the Morning Wakens 


is toward truth. He may be sinning every day and yet 
that verse be true. He may be retreating two paces 
and advancing three. And God judges us not by the 
where of our life but by its whither—its direction, 
its dip, its tendency. It matters not on which rung 
of the ladder our feet are standing. The momentous 
thing is, are we going up or are we going down? The 
man who expects to pass his Finals by a sort of death- 
bed repentance is just befooling himself. We are 
judged not by the few pious thoughts we are able 
to cram on the last night of our earthly existence, but 
by the whole swing and drift of our record. God does 
not judge a man by what he does the last few days 
of his life. It is the whole career that God surveys. 
Many a man has stolen who is not at heart a thief. 
Many a poor fellow has gotten the worse of drink 
who is not by any means a drunkard. 

The peril of our age is that so many have no out- 
look, no open window. The shutters are barred, the 
blinds are down and the people within so occupied 
and engrossed with the cares of the world that for 
them there is no sun, no stars, no sky, no distant hills, 
no horizon, no larger world. This is the peril of multi- 
tudes to-day. And the materialist is not the only man 
who is exposed to the danger. Many who call them- 
selves professing Christians are guilty too. There 
are thousands in our churches who need to have their 
windows thrown open so that the fresh air can rush 
in and sweep away the cobwebs of formalism and tra- 
ditionalism and ventilate the dusty corners. Oh, for 
the strong winds of God to blow through our old musty 


“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” 59 


creeds! So much of our theology is dry and stale. It 
is the glory of Christ that He is always letting day- 
light and fresh air into things. 

Here then are two stories from the far away. And 
not so far away either. Indeed, they are being re- 
enacted every day. We are all of us called upon to 
make just such a choice as Lot had to make. Here 
is a favored plain that promises a life of ease and 
pleasure and indulgence. Fase is not always wrong, 
but often it is a step toward Sodom. The life of pleas- 
ure is not necessarily an evil life but it may be a turn 
toward Gomorrah. Prosperity is not necessarily a 
wicked thing but it may be a mighty dangerous thing. 
It may be won at too costly a price. Not one of us but 
needs to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” It is 
so easy to follow the path of least resistance. And 
that is exactly what Lot did. It is the way the world 
does. It’s human nature. Indeed the law is written 
everywhere. Pour out a glass of water on the ground; 
it will follow the path of least resistance. Lot fol- 
lowed the line of least resistance. 

Daniel, on the other hand, was a man of conviction. 
He was true to his name. He dared to be a Daniel. 
The temptations to emolument were as impotent to 
move him as were the lions in the cage. He wore the 
“white flower of a blameless life.” He was a man 
of prayer. When he opened that window his heart 
was far away in the homeland. He was thinking of 
the temple. He could see by faith the city that he 
loved. He lived as seeing Him who is invisible. 

Human life has often been compared to a river. 


60 When the Morning Wakens 


Here is our own beautiful Hudson. Many consider it 
the most picturesque river in the world. It rises in 
the Adirondacks 4,000 feet above sea level. It flows 
transversely through the Appalachian ridges, the oldest 
rock in America. Sometimes its course is east, some- 
times west, sometimes even north. It winds for 16 
miles through the Highlands between banks that rise 
1500 feet sheer on either side. At one point it almost 
loses itself in the Tappan Sea four miles wide, then 
suddenly it becomes a narrow gorge that you could 
almost drive a golf ball across. The dip of the river 
in spots is very steep, in some places more than 60 feet 
per mile. Near its mouth for 18 miles it has hewn 
out for itself a great dike of trap rock called the 
Palisades. 

Then what a historic stream it is! Every nook 
and corner is connected with the history of our 
Independence. At West Point there is our great 
Military Academy. At Newburgh was Washington’s 
headquarters. At Tarrytown André was captured. 
Here are the scenes that Fenimore Cooper loved. Here 
are the mountains where Rip Van Winkle slept. It 
was an important waterway in the Revolutionary War. 
It was on this river that steam navigation was first 
introduced by Robert Fulton. You may talk of the 
rocks and mountains in its path, of the obstacles that 
try to block its progress, the windings and circum- 
windings—none of these things are insurmountable. 
All the way along, from its source 300 miles up yon- 
der, it is destined for the ocean and the ocean it is 
bound to reach. Nothing can stay its course. 


“And Nightly Pitch My Moving Tent” 61 


Such is human life. From God it comes. To God 
it must return. The obstacles are nothing. No difh- 
culty matters. Success is nothing. Fame is nothing. 
Glory is nothing. Christ’s valuation of life’s goods 
is so different from ours. Money, comfort, position, 
fame—all are low down on His scale. A lad who be- 
came the Governor of the State of Massachusetts, once 
came very near to death by drowning. He had to swim 
nearly a mile from a boat that had overturned. After- 
ward when he was relating his experiences to his 
mother, he said: “I just thought of you, Mother, and 
kept on swimming.” There is a lesson in that for us. 
Let us fix our eye on the goal and keep on swimming. 
“Let us run with patience the race set before us, looking 
unto Jesus.” 


Vv 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 


“The harvest truly is plenteous but the 
laborers are few.” 
Luke 10:2 


THIs is one of those texts that calls for imagination, 
Imagination is the power of mental vision. Spiritual 
imagination is the power of spiritual vision. Our 
Lord had a rich imagination. He has just been speak- 
ing the parable of the sower. The harvest was four 
months away. The fields of Samaria had only been 
plowed. The farms were just coming out of the dead 
sleep of winter. “Say not ye there are four months 
and then cometh harvest: look on the fields, they are 
white.” He saw the harvest already in the red soil. 
And now He is sending out the seventy, and He tells 
them as they go out two by two: “The harvest truly 
is great but the laborers are few.” And when these 
same seventy returned He exclaimed: “I beheld Satan 
as lightning fall from heaven.” His imagination was 
so strong and penetrating that in the first feeble vic- 
tories of these Apostles He saw the earnest of the resti- 
tution of all things. They were the advance guard of 


the hosts that were coming. 
62 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 63 


Jesus is ever appealing to the imagination. It is a 
great spiritual gift, as Wordsworth said. It is the inner 
eye which sees farther and deeper than scholarship 
or experience or even intuition. Paul speaks of the 
golden age, when “every knee shall bow and every 
tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” What is 
this but a great dream of inspired imagination? Think 
of the vision that came to Isaiah “when nations should 
beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into 
pruning hooks and learn war no more.’ Men to-day 
are telling us that that sort of stuff is rubbish, that 
war is inevitable. But not so this old prophet! His 
imagination was kindled into “magnificent hopeful- 
ness” by the touch of God. It is the vision the writer 
to the Hebrews had when he said: “We see not yet 
all things put under Him, but with the eye of faith we 
do see even now Jesus who was made a little lower 
than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned 
with glory and honor.” 

Imagination and faith are close akin. Some one calls 
faith the child of the imagination. Faith is realiz- 
ing the attainable, it is substantiating the possible, giv- 
ing substance to it, giving body to things hoped for. 
Do you recall that story from the life of Robert 
Moffat? He and his wife went out to Africa in 1817. 
They labored there for twelve long years before a 
single convert was in sight. Then six loomed up at 
once. Now it happened that three years before this 
first fruit of the harvest, Mrs. Moffat had received a 
letter from some of her friends at home who wished 
to present her with a gift and asked what she would _ 


64 When the Morning Wakens 


like to have. She replied, “Send us a communion 
set.” The gift was long in coming. And strange 
to say it came just as these six men were about 
to be received into the church. Singular coincidence! 
Many no doubt would so regard it, but those who be- 
lieve in the power of faith and prayer would not call 
it such. They would prefer to say that this good 
woman had something of the vision the Master had. 
It was the fulfillment of a long and forward-looking 
expectancy. One is reminded of Mary Slessor. She 
had this same “magnificent hopefulness” when she went 
out to Africa from her humble Scotch weaving shed. 
When the Indian Chief scoffed at the idea of being 
helped by a woman, she replied, “But you have for- 
gotten the woman’s God.” 

Now the word harvest with us has several mean- 
ings. When we use it we usually mean crop, yield, the 
fruit of the farm. Then we stretch it to include the 
outcome of any exertion. We say of a business, it 
yields a fine harvest. If a man is successful in his 
investments, if he strikes oil, if he drives “a roaring 
trade,’ we say of him, what a harvest that man is reap- 
ing! We speak of the harvest of sin. We speak of 
the harvest of death. Death is the great grim reaper. 
How noiselessly he moves! How his feet are lined 
with velvet! How silently he swings his scythe, and 
one by one mows us all down! 

But the harvest the Master is talking about is not 
corn or wheat or barley or human life; it is an immor- 
tal crop, a harvest of souls. Human souls are His 
sheaves. Every soul brought up out of the miry clay 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 65 


and set on the King’s Highway is a part of Christ’s 
gleaning. Men and women are His field of enterprise. 
“And I looked and behold a white cloud, and upon the 
cloud one sat like unto the Son of Man, having on His 
head a golden crown, and in His hand a sickle. And 
another angel came out of the temple, crying with a 
loud voice to Him that sat on the cloud, thrust in thy 
sickle and reap: and He that sat on the cloud thrust in 
His sickle and the earth was reaped.” That was the 
Master’s harvest. 

And the beautiful thing about it is, this harvest is 
ripe we are told. That does not mean that every 
human soul is ready for the granary. It means rather 
that there is one here, another over there, one in that 
boys’ club, one in that Sunday school class. Christian 
reaping 1s a matter of individual work, picking the 
fruit. The harvest is ready, waiting for the sickle, and 
if it is not cut and gathered and stooked, it will fall 
and be a dead loss to the Kingdom. 

And is there any loss greater? Note carefully the 
words the Master uses. He does not say with New- 
ton, ‘pebbles by the sea,” or even with Carey, “jewels 
in the mine.” “I will go down into the mine if you 
will hold the rope.” He says corn fields, wheat fields, 
precious wheat, the most precious thing that grows. 
It is a sad thing to see corn fields going to waste; sad 
to look upon the golden ears of barley bending under 
the summer breeze and shelling. It is possible to have 
an excellent harvest but to leave it ungarnered. Ifa 
jewel is lost it may be found, but if a field of grain 
rots it can never be restored. We are not only to 


66 When the Morning Wakens 


preach the good news; we are not only to give the 
evangel to the world. We are to disciple all nations. 
We are to preach the gospel to every creature, but that 
means more than simply proclaiming the message. It 
means that we are to proclaim it in such a winsome 
way that it will be accepted, at least in such a way that 
we will not be responsible if it is rejected. It means 
that we are to study the mind of the listener so as to 
inspire his confidence and win his love. It means ina 
word that we are to be reapers. 

Here then is a message from autumn. We are let- 
ting autumn speak to us to-day. But we cannot under- 
stand the message of autumn unless we first get the 
message of spring. Spurgeon used to say that just 
as there are four evangelists in the New Testament, 
so there are four evangelists in Nature—spring, sum- 
mer, autumn, winter. There is a little book called 
“The Fallow.” It is an anonymous work. And there 
is a story in it of a man who lay dying in a New York 
hospital one warm May day, a lad born out on the 
prairies and accustomed to farm life. One morning 
he came out of his delirium, and looking out of the 
window he saw the beauty of the lawn and said to the 
nursé, “What month is this?” She said, “It is May.” 
And falling back he whispered to himself: “I must 
not die, it’s sowing time.” 

Well, this is sowing time in the Kingdom, but the 
fundamental fact that underlies all spiritual agricul- 
ture is that it is reaping time too. The Lord of the 
harvest is the great Sower. The seed He sows is 
truth. The seed is the Word. The word of God has 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 67 


never been absent from the life of man. The spirit 
of the living God has been scattering grain for years 
in the red furrows of human hearts. Some of the 
ground is good ground, some of it is mighty poor, some 
of it is stony, some thorny. Some of it brings forth 
thirtyfold, some sixty, some an hundred. Some we 
never hear from at all. It falls on the highway and 
is lost. It is the same seed, but what an infinite variety 
of soils! And only that soil is good that is responsive. 
Over the great wide fields of human life the Divine 
Sower scatters His seed, and the soil that responds 
is the soil of the Kingdom. 

There is a familiar verse in the good Book which 
says: ‘‘Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap.” 
This is always true in spiritual things but not always 
is it found true in nature. Because there is not a lit- 
tle sowing in the physical fields of the world which is 
never followed by any reaping at all. The seed may 
rot or be blighted or it may fall on rock by the way- 
side. Jesus says, “A sower went forth to sow,” but 
He does not tell us whether the man ever reaped or not. 
A man may toil for years to build up a business. He 
may be wise and honest and faithful. But when he is 
in sight of his hopes a great commercial blow-out may 
sweep away his plans, and cause everything to slip from 
his grasp; or some physical malady may lay him aside. 
The lower levels of life are exposed to storms and 
floods. What we sow there, we are never sure of 
reaping. It is only the eternal fields that guarantee 
a harvest. | 

Now in the passage before us there are two facts 


68 When the Morning Wakens 


mentioned. First, the harvest is plenteous; it is abun- 
dant. We would say to-day a splendid harvest, a golden 
harvest. Sometimes the criticism is heard, I do not 
believe in revivals; I think there ought to be a revival 
in the church all the time. If by that is meant that we 
ought to be gleaning a harvest all the time, well and 
good, but if it is meant that there are not special 
periods of refreshing it is not true either to nature or 
to history. It is not the law of the spiritual world 
any more than of the natural. Rich harvests are inter- 
mittent things. They go in waves. Sometimes there 
are long spaces of weary waiting. As in nature, so in 
spirit there are seasons of blessing. 

And just such a time there was when the Master 
spoke these words. The harvest was plenteous. The 
Jews thought the Samaritans were unripe and yet 
Christ showed how ready they were for the sickle. 
It was to a woman of Samaria that He preached one 
of His profoundest sermons. It was to a heathen 
woman of Canaan that He said, “O woman, great is 
thy faith.” It was to a pagan Roman soldier that He 
confessed, “Verily I say unto you, I have not found so 
great faith, no not in Israel”; adding furthermore 
those memorable words, “And I say unto you that 
many shall come from the east and from the west and 
shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob 
in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Dear, surpassingly dear 
to Him were His own people, the chosen of God. None 
ever loved them as did He, but all the same some of 
His tenderest words were spoken to aliens and 
strangers. How touched He was with the faith of the 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 69 


Syrophenician woman! How the coming of the Greeks 
drew from Him a burst of holy joy! 

And one cannot help feeling that there is just such 
another time to-day. The world seems to be ripe for 
great spiritual returns. The fields are white. There 
is a possible harvest in every land, and could we but 
look at men and women through the Master’s eyes 
we should see that many of them were ready for the 
sickle and just waiting to be gathered. There are 
godless homes here on Fifth Avenue and under the 
very eaves of our churches. But there are, on the 
other hand, stirrings of conscience and gropings after 
the divine under the paint and thick skin of the bar- 
barian. In the 8th chapter of Acts we read that when 
the Holy Ghost led Philip to a humble inquirer say- 
ing, “Go join thyself to this chariot,” the poor black 
man was not far from the Kingdom. 

Look out at the great heathen world. Many there 
are who believe that we are on the verge of a spiritual 
awakening there that is going to astonish mankind. 
They feel that the present hour is the most momentous 
in the world’s history. Those who know tell us that 
there is a breaking up of traditions in India. There are 
marvelous changes going on in China and Japan. The 
book of the Acts is the only unfinished book in the 
Bible; it is gradually being added to every year and 
brought up to date. And the chapters are being written 
by our modern apostles. The world is waiting for 
the church to go in and garner the ripening wheat. 

Instance one page from the story of modern mis- 
sions. Every child has heard of Uganda. There is a 


70 When the Morning Wakens 


province in Uganda known as Busoga and the king of 
this province was until a few years ago a cannibal. 
He armed his troops and waged war with every tribe 
about him—chiefly for plunder. He was the terror 
of the country. He had a vast harem of women, and 
when they did not please him he did not hesitate to 
cut off their fingers or their ears by way of torture. 
He was a typical African savage. Now it chanced that 
in the year 1906, a missionary was showing some stere- 
opticon pictures of the life of Christ. King Tabingwa 
happened to be present, and the pictures made such an 
impression on him that he stood up and said he wanted 
to become Christ’s follower. He was baptized next day 
in the presence of about a thousand of his subjects. 
It would seem indeed that if the true light is lighted 
anywhere, some eyes will open and respond. 

And the other thought, the laborers are few. How ~ 
few they are indeed! We have one ordained Protestant 
minister at home for every five hundred of our popu- 
lation. We have one in non-Christian lands for about 
every 50,000. We have one doctor in this country 
for every thousand people; over there, roughly speak- 
ing, one to about every million. That does not look 
like the work of flaming crusaders in an undying cause, 
does it? Even here in the homeland, the laborers are 
but a handful. Those who have had any experience in 
trying to secure teachers for the Sunday school or the 
mission have had it brought home to them in a lament- 
able way how rare volunteers really are. What is lack- 
ing more than anything else in the fields and vineyards 
to-day is reapers. It is a fine thing to write a check 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 71 


and send it in and say, Get some visitor to go out and 
take my place. That is splendid. We are not belittling 
it. Only it cannot take our place. No one can hire 
another to do his work. 

There is a wide difference between preaching and 
delivering a sermon. Most people have such a conven- 
tional idea of what preaching is. We can preach by 
smiling, by singing, by saying good morning, by visit- 
ing the sick, by speaking a kind word to somebody that 
is tired, by writing a letter. Harlan Page conducted a 
great business but he never was too busy to drop every- 
thing and sit down and write a letter for his Master. 
You can take a day off from your bank or your store 
or your office, and put a little tract in your pocket and 
go out and preach. George Muller of Bristol was one 
of the church’s immortals. In the story of his life, he 
calls it “The Narrative of My Life,” he gives his exper- 
ience in this matter of tracts. And what a fruitful 
experience it was! The Socialist is using it; the an- 
archist is using it; the atheist is using it. If you walk 
down 42nd Street almost any afternoon you will see a 
man peddling a paper, “The Atheist’s Weekly.” You 
will see another with one entitled “Birth Control.” 
“The children of this world are in their generation 
wiser than the children of light.” 

We must go where the people are. That is what 
every business enterprise is doing. They go to the 
people. The more populous the community the greater 
the harvest. I am told that the United Cigar 
Corporation knows fairly accurately the numbers that 
pass any one of their stores every day. One of my own 


72 When the Morning Wakens 


friends, a boot and shoe man in Los Angeles, was con- 
sidering starting a new store in that city. He had 
three or four sites under consideration, and he posted 
a man for a whole day at each corner to count the 
numbers that passed by from Io in the morning until 
5 or 6 in the evening. Before selecting his site he 
wanted a rough estimate of these figures. That is what 
business enterprise does. Why should not the church 
do it? Do you recall that remarkable story of Gas- 
pard de Coligni who was wounded at the battle of St. 
Quentin? While convalescing in the hospital he read 
a little pamphlet and was converted by it. He became 
a great French admiral and his statue can be seen © 
to-day in one of the parks of Paris, standing with a 
Bible in his hand. He gave the pamphlet to his nurse 
and she gave it to the Lady Superior, who was also 
converted by reading it. She fled to Holland, where 
she became the wife of William of Orange, the organ- 
izer of our Dutch Reformed Church. It is his coat of 
arms which you see on our calendar. What the world 
needs to-day more than anything else is the revival of 
personal effort—the touch of your hand, the tone of 
your voice, the sympathy of your warm, loving heart. 

And then lastly there is the call to Prayer. “Pray 
ye the Lord of the harvest that he will send laborers 
into his harvest.” The campaign for money is im- 
portant but the really urgent campaign is for men. 
What avail all our money if the men be lacking? In 
the World War the United States took the short cut 
of conscription. She drafted her soldiers but our 
Leader does not draft. Ours to pray, His the leading. 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 73 


What the church needs to-day is to marshal the 
intercession of her membership. Without the leverage 
of prayer this load can never be lifted. The only policy 
that Jesus proposed was the policy of prayer. He said 
nothing of conferences or drives or committees. The 
key to the power house is in our own hands. Not “We 
can do it if we will’ or “We can do it and we will,” 
but “He can do it if we will.” The Master did not 
say, the harvest is ripe, let us ask God to reap it. That 
He could easily do to be sure. He could reap His 
harvest without your aid or mine. But such is not His 
plan. We are His instruments. We are to pray, and 
then we are to say, maybe we can answer our own 
prayers. Oh, what a problem confronts us! The 
heart of two great continents, Asia and Africa, is 
almost untouched. In China alone the task is gigantic. 
Tibet and Afghanistan are destitute. In India there is 
province after province unmanned. Africa is still 
largely a vast sweep of unrelieved darkness. Abys- 
sinia has but one Protestant station, Whole tribes are 
Mohammedan or pagan. But our hearts must not 
falter at figures. The Moslem menace is great but 
prayer is greater. Do you ask who or what is sufficient 
for these things? Our very dismay urges us to reply, 
Nothing is sufficient but prayer. 

Let us remember then that it is the Lord of the 
harvest himself that calls His laborers. The work is 
apostolic. “These twelve Jesus sent forth.” And 
these seventy likewise. And the word used is a strong 
one, “Sent forth,” literally drove forth. It implies 
urgency. “The spirit driveth Him into the wilderness.” 


74 When the Morning Wakens 


Who was it summoned Carey from his cobbler’s bench 
and drove him out to India where he toiled for three 
and forty years? Did the church? Judge by Ryland’s 
rebuke that such a rash and foolish venture would be 
flying in the face of Providence. Who was it drove 
Robert Morrison and Burns to China? Was it the 
church? Who was it drove John Williams the black- 
smith out to the South Seas to become the regenerator 
of Western Polynesia? Who was it drove Judson, 
and drove him against his will, out to Burmah, 
where he labored for years without reaping a single 
sheaf, and when his friends began to think he had 
missed his calling, he replied, “If you are tired of wait- 
ing just leave me, and twenty years hence look this 
way.” And to-day if you look that way you will see 
a great granary of golden grain ingathered for the 
glory of God. 

Or take the case of Madagascar with the blood of its 
martyred saints. It is Christ’s own commission that 
we take His evangel to the uttermost parts, and if we 
cannot go ourselves, let us pray the Lord of the har- 
vest that He will send some one in our place. Who was 
it drove Judson out to Burmah to toil for six long years 
before he had won a single star for his crown? Or 
Henry Martyn to Persia to “burn out for God’? Or 
Keith Falconer to sow the seed on dry gravel among 
the Arabs? Or James Gilmour to Mongolia to endure 
the heartache of waiting for almost a lifetime before 
he had anything to show, and then walking twenty- 
three miles over the burning desert to have a personal 
interview with his first recruit? Till he said himself 


“Bringing in the Sheaves” 75 


he felt “as if he were trying to lift a pane of glass by 
taking hold of its face.” Hear the ringing words 
of Mary Lyon, “If you want most to serve your race, 
go where no one else will go, and do what no one else 
will do. Look for positions that will make the heavi- 
est demands on your self-sacrifice, test the fiber of your - 
sainthood most severely, and remember every inch of 
your journey that God can accomplish wonders through 
a man if he will only get low enough to let him use 
him.” 


“Come, dear Heart! 
The fields are white to harvest : come and see 
As in a glass the timeless mystery 
Of love, whereby we feed 
On God, our bread indeed. 
Torn by the sickles, see Him share the smart 
Of travailing Creation; maimed, despised, 
Yet by His lovers the more dearly prized 
Because for us He lays His beauty down— 
Last toll paid by Perfection for our loss! 
Trace on these fields His everlasting Cross, 
And o’er the stricken sheaves the immortal 
Victim’s Crown.” 


Evelyn Under hull. 


Vi 


“In Lowly Paths of Service Free” 


“But a certain Samaritan as he jour- 
neyed. ...” 


Luke 10:33. 


EverYBopy is familiar with the story. Perhaps it 
was a true story. Who knows? Maybe something of 
the kind had just taken place and the facts were fresh 
in people’s minds. Possibly some commercial traveler 
had been attacked by bandits and everybody was 
talking about it. Not at all improbable. And the 
Master took the details, worked them into a spiritual 
setting and in this way gave them an eternal value. 
We call it the parable of the good Samaritan. Mr. 
Silvester Horne called it the parable of the Great High 
Road. But it is more than a parable; it is a great mov- 
ing drama, And what a medley of characters there are 
presented. There is a priest, a Levite, a Samaritan, a 
wounded man and a robber. They had almost nothing 
in common. Nothing but an accident or an outrage 
could ever have brought such a cluster together. Indeed 
we are told that it was by chance they all met—and on 
a lonely road at that, and dangerous. 

Turn your eye on the cast fora moment. There is 

76 





“In Lowly Paths of Service Free” 77 


first of all the priest. Jericho we know was full of 
priests. There was a school of the prophets there. The 
priest was the special servant of the Most High. Doubt- 
less he had just come from the Temple where he had 
been ministering in sacred things. He was a pillar of 
the whole religious edifice. One can easily picture 
the eyes of the bleeding man as they looked up be- 
seechingly into the face of this priest of God, perhaps 
with a Bible and a prayer book under his arm. 

Then there is the Levite. He is one of the under- 
lings of the Temple, a sort of curate, a young man 
perhaps from the theological seminary. He too was a 
minister in holy things, another prop of the religious 
system. But when he saw the wounds and the red 
blood flowing, he passed. by too. Some say he was 
chicken-hearted, but this is altogether too generous. It 
looks more like a case of being just plumb plain hard- 
hearted. It is quite possible to have the Psalms of 
David and the laws of Leviticus ringing in one’s ears, 
and yet one’s heart be hard as hickory. The two 
worst characters in the drama are the very two that 
we would have expected to have been the best. 

Then we see another human approaching. It is a 
Samaritan. The hatred between Jew and Samaritan is 
almost hopeless to make real. To a Jew a Samaritan 
was on the level with a dog. He would not sit at the 
same table with him. A Samaritan was an outcast 
from the commonwealth of Israel. And now a Samari- 
tan has a Jew in his power. One wonders what he will 
do. Let us follow and see. He comes to the unfor- 
tunate fellow and when he looks down, a lump rises in 








78 When the Morning Wakens 


his throat. “He had compassion on him,” we are 
told. He read in an instant the rough and bleeding 
facts. All the old hatred was forgotten. Here is a 
human being in trouble. And so his first impulse is 
to go to work and help him. He went out of his way. 
He takes the wine and the oil and the bandages. Then 
he lifts him on his donkey and walks himself, holding 
him on no doubt with one hand. And when he arrived 
at the inn he hands him over to the host, saying: “Take 
good care of him.” He was without doubt a poor man 
himself for he only gave him two pence. That would 
pay his expenses for about one day. But take good care 
of him: I will return and see how he is getting along, 
and “whatsoever you spend more when I come again 
[I will repay you.” 

This then is the story. And is it not a beautiful 
story? It tests our Christianity. What blessed results 
have flowed from it! Who can number the thousands 
of hospitals it has erected, the asylums, the multitude 
of homes for the oppressed and unfortunate. If ever 
we are tempted to lose heart when we think of the 
selfishness of society and the hardness and heartless- 
ness of the commercial struggle, our courage returns 
when we recall the countless institutions of charity 
and relief that are all around us. It is indeed a beauti- 
ful story. And it will be remembered that it was told 
as an answer to the question, ‘““Who is my neighbor?” 
That question had just been asked by a lawyer, i.e., 
one versed in law, especially religious law. Who is 
my neighbor? It was one of the knotty living ques- 
tions of the day. It was warmly debated in the Rab- 


“In Lowly Paths of Service Free” 79 


binical schools. The lawyers were discussing it, dis- 
cussing it to be sure in a very small, petty, legal, aca- 
demic way. ‘Who is my neighbor?” With whom 
may I trade? With whom may I associate? Whose 
garments are unclean that I happen to touch? To 
whom do I owe the love commanded by the law? 
What is it makes a man a neighbor of mine? 
The old Levitical code said: “Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself.’’ Yes, but who is my neighbor? 
That is the whole point. These lawyers were so busy 
with their definitions that they forgot all about their 
duties. No doubt this particular lawyer expected 
another definition. Bear in mind the common belief 
of the day that humane obligations were limited. A Jew 
owed nothing at all to a Gentile. The Master, how- 
ever, lifts the whole controversy out of the realm of 
definition. As some one has said, “He does not give a 
definition: He describes a situation.” 

I. Now the first lesson to learn from this matchless 
narrative is that our neighbor is our fellow-man in 
need. That is the whole genius of the parable. We 
are to love our fellow-men simply because they are 
our fellow-men. It makes no difference where they live, 
or how they live, or what their business or their creed 
or their color. Every human being, because he is a 
human being, has a claim on us if we can help him. 
And when we say a claim on us, we mean a claim on 
our affection. We usually think that our neighbor is 
the man who lives next door. But Jesus says a neigh- 
bor is one with whom we have somehow or other been 
brought into contact. We may live next door to,him 


80 When the Morning Wakens 


or not. It is possible here in New York to live next 
door to a man and never know him. [ lived for ten 
years in an apartment and I never knew the people 
above me or below me. I did not know what they 
looked like. I would not have recognized them had I 
met them on the street. Jesus says proximity has 
nothing to do with neighborliness. A man is my neigh- 
bor when we have exchanged intercourse, feeling, ex- 
perience. To have the opportunity of helping—that is 
to be a neighbor. It matters not whether the man who 
crosses our pathway is rich or poor; the only thing 
that matters is, does he need me? Our neighbor is 
anybody in trouble to whom we have an opportunity 
of being kind. This is the way to secure a pass through 
the pearly gates. 

It will be readily seen how revolutionary such teach- 
ing was in the days of our Lord. The Jews were not 
permitted to even eat with a man who was a Gentile. 
Everybody outside the pale of Judaism was unclean. 
To the Greeks all nations save their own were bar- 
barians. The Romans knew even less about humanity. 
They believed that their mission was to conquer and 
enslave all the peoples of the earth. They knew nothing 
at all about humanity. Mercy was a virtue they did not 
even consider. One of their greatest poets speaks of 
the pleasure it gives him to see others in trouble. 
“How lovely,” he says, “to sit on the shore and watch 
the people struggling for their lives in the waves.” “I 
hate the vulgar crowd,” another of their poets sings. 
Think of a man like Seneca saying, “Pity is morbid 
and unworthy of wise men.” Rome in her palmiest 


“In Lowly Paths of Service Free” 81 


days, with a population of more than a million souls, 
had not a single hospital. Corinth had none, No such 
thing as a hospital anywhere in those days! No insti- 
tution for crippled children, or crippled anything. Ac- 
cording to Plato the cripple must be eliminated. Do 
we realize that it was a bishop of the Christian church 
who founded the great hospital in Pontus. Do we 
appreciate the fact that it was a Christian woman who 
founded the first hospital in Rome? She was a dis- 
ciple of St. Jerome. Do we ever stop to consider 
that it was a Christian empress who was the first hos- 
pital nurse? | | 

The criticism is sometimes made that if you want a 
kindness done to you to-day, you must go to some 
one who makes no profession of religion. But the 
slur is unwarranted. There are no kinder-hearted 
people anywhere than are to be found in the sanctuary. 
Let us not forget that in the World War something like 
ninety per cent. of all the money given to the Red 
Cross was given by the churches. It is the religious 
people of this country, who are supporting the hos- 
pitals and the orphanages and the sheltering homes. 
The new thing that the Gospel brought into the world 
was kindness and brotherhood. The spirit of Christ 
is the spirit of the Good Samaritan. Help takes the 
place of oppression. 

The trouble with most of us to-day is we do not 
realize how far-reaching this truth is. One man says, 
I’m a busy man and in the run of a day I meet all 
sorts and conditions of people. There are my family, 
my friends, my business associates, my customers, my 


82 When the Morning Wakens 


clients, my patients. Then there are the scores I meet 
casually on the streets and with whom I have simply 
a nodding acquaintance. It is quite impossible to feel 
toward all these people in the same way. I have not the 
time for one thing. I must pick out those with whom I 
feel I ought to be friendly and in whose welfare I 
feel I ought to be concerned. This is the way that 
many argue and so narrow the scope of their sympa- 
thies. And as a consequence it often happens that a 
good churchman is a poor citizen, or he may be even 
unreliable in his business dealings. Simply because 
when asked, who is my neighbor? he answers by limit- 
ing his sphere of interest to some little section instead 
of covering the whole. To love those who love us, 
well that is an easy matter; it is really one of the lux- 
uries of life. Ah! but to love the unlovely, the dis- 
advantaged, the repellent—that is where the sandal rubs. 

Here was a poor Samaritan. He was going about 
his ordinary duties. He did not come purposely to 
the scene of robbery to find out if there was anything 
he could do. He was no crusader going out on some 
important mission of adventure. The way the story 
puts it is, “As he journeyed along.” He was just a 
simple peasant journeying along on his own ass and 
- going about his own business. There is a little story 
by Jacob Riis entitled “Neighbors.” It is the tale 
of a poor tattered violinist sitting on the curbstone 
on Christmas eve, grinding out his tunes, cracked 
and old like himself. He has been playing all after- 
noon and there are only a few pennies in his cup. And 
then a young woman comes along, richly dressed, and 


“In Lowly Paths of Service Free” 83 


with every mark of refinement. She takes the violin 
from his hands and begins to play. Soon the street 
traffic is halted. The people realize that an artist is 
at the strings. One after another empties their silver 
into the pail, and when the vessel is full she says: “A 
Merry Christmas, Friend,’”’ and passes on and is lost 
in the crowd. It is the parable up to date. 

II. And the second lesson is that humanity with 
love is infinitely better than orthodoxy without it. Now 
do we believe that? It is true whether we believe it or 
not. This man knew very little. He was not much 
better than a pagan. He did not know exactly what 
he believed. Maybe he believed little more than 
nothing. Christ Himself said to the woman of Sa- 
maria, “Ye know not what ye worship.” He was a 
heretic, an outcast. And yet when it came to grips 
with the rough bleeding facts of life, he had the heart 
of the matter in him. So that when placed side by side 
with respectable church-going orthodoxy he towers 
clean and clear out of sight. 

There are two views of what Christianity really is, 
some claiming that it is another-world affair. We 
are to be indifferent to comfort and ease and luxury 
and even pain. We are only pilgrims under proba- 
tion. We are here for discipline. Let us make the 
best of our lot. It will not be long anyway. The main 
thing is to read our title clear to mansions in the skies. 
The other view is that our chief business down here 
is to be kind, to feed hungry mouths, to clothe naked 
bodies, to visit the sick, to do all the good we can and 
at all times to keep ourselves unspotted from the world. 


84 When the Morning Wakens 


Ah, we need to learn this lesson to-day. There are 
scores of people who go regularly to the Temple. They 
can see symbols and vestments and surplices and cas- 
socks and canonicals. But they do not seem able to 
see their wounded brothers and sisters lying helpless 
on the roadside. Some people are so plagued busy 
with definitions of religion that they have no time 
left for religion. Some people are so busy humming 
hymns that they cannot hear the sobs that come from 
the alley. What is the good of all our hymn-singing 
if it drowns out the cries of the poor sinking unfor- 
tunates? Singing and praying and chanting are all 
very well, but are we to suppose that God is greatly 
interested in the noise we make in church? Ata meet- 
ing of Christian workers in New York some years ago, 
Captain Mahan, the well known naval expert, pointed 
out in very forcible language the tendency of the 
modern church to reverse the order of the command- 
ments of the Gospel. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, 
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart,” 
this is the first and great commandment. And the 
second is like unto it, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself.’ “But,” said Captain Mahan, “the modern 
church is tempted to say, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself,’ this is the first and great commandment; 
and the second is like unto it, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart!’ ” 

That may be true, but how are we to know that we 
love God? Are we not told that he that loveth not his 
brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God 
whom he hath not seen? If we claim to love God 


“In Lowly Paths of Service Free’ 85 


whom we have never seen and yet go home and are 
hardly civil to those whom we see every day—what 
is our claim worth? There is an interesting tale told 
of Leigh Hunt. The Hunts were very poor when he 
was a lad, and Leigh relates how one night he was 
with his mother somewhere in the vicinity of Black- 
friars Bridge when a wretched woman approached and 
said she was cold. His mother had no money to give, 
but she told the woman to follow her, and turning into 
a small dark side street she took off her flannel petti- 
coat and gave it to her. She took cold herself from 
the act and a long illness followed, from which she 
died. Well, that is the parable up to date again. 


“What care I for caste or creed ? 
It is the deed, it is the deed. 
What for class, or what for clan? 
It is the man, it is the man. 
Heirs of love, and joy, and woe, 
Who is high, and who is low? 
Mountain, valley, sky, and sea 
Are for all humanity. 
What care I for robe or stole? 
It is the soul, it is the soul. 
What for crown, or what for crest? 
It is the heart, within the breast; 
It is the faith, it is the hope, 
It is the struggle up the slope. 
It is the brain and eye to see 
One God and one humanity.” 


Vil 


“TI Know Too Well the Poison and the Sting” 


“You say I am rich, I am well off, I lack 
nothing—not knowing you are a miserable 
creature, pitiful and poor and blind and 
naked.” 


Revelation 3:17. 


THESE words were spoken to the lukewarm Laodi- 
ceans. They were poor but they did not know how 
poor they were. Some people are rich and are uncon- 
scious of the fact. Others are poor and seem not to be 
in the least aware of that fact. It is possible to look 
at life just asa caterer might. During the World War 
one mother who had a son at the front came to a 
friend to read a letter for her which she had just 
received from her boy. The poor soul herself could 
neither read nor write. The letter spoke of a draft on 
a certain bank which he was sending. The friend said, 
“Wasn't there something else in this letter? It speaks 
of a draft.” ‘Nothing but a bit of paper,” she an- 
swered, “I threw it away.” She knew not the value 
of that bit of paper. Fortunately it had not been 
destroyed. 


Who is the truly rich man, the man who owns a 
86 


“I Know Too Well the Poison and Sting” 87 


yacht and cruises among the Thousand Islands or 
along the coasts of Southern France, blind to the 
beauty of sky and shore; or St. Francis, that joyous 
soul who loved the flowers as a mother loves her 
children, who called the beasts his brothers, who 
went into raptures over the birds, who called poverty 
his bride, and yet who lived the life of a beggar, and 
who breathed his last breath out on the hill sides while 
the birds sang over his wasted body? Chesterton clos- 
ing his biography of this holy saint describes his death 
as follows: 


“The stars which passed above the gaunt and wasted 
corpse, stark upon the rocky floor, had for once, in 
all their shining cycles round the world of laboring 
humanity, looked down upon a happy man.” 


Yonder is a great patrimony. The owner leads you 
through his noble castle. You admire the furnishings, 
the paintings, the sculptures, the rugs, the curios, the 
coins, the ivories, the potteries. Do you envy him? 
Maybe the joy they give you is greater than the joy 
they give him. You may hear a music in his running 
brooks that he never hears. You may see a glory in 
the hills of which he never gets a passing glimpse. Yes, 
he owns the place in fee and title, but what are fee 
and title compared with taste and imagination and 
appreciation? Maybe it is you the estate enriches, not 
he. “We do not always own the things we own; so 
often they own us.” “Things are in the saddle and 
ride mankind.” He has the title to the great estate, 


88 When the Morning Wakens 


but think of the scores who will have the title to it 
after he is gone. 

What is it constitutes true ownership anyway? Is 
it the parchment deed or is it the power to appropriate ? 
Paul writing to the Corinthians says, ‘All things are 
yours.” What astonishing words! Remember he was 
writing to people who were most of them slaves. What 
could he have meant? Was he simply rounding a 
period? He meant that all true possession is an in- 
ward thing. It is a matter of thought and feeling and 
perception. 

In one of those charming essays of E. V. Lucas, 
whom Edmund Gosse has recently rated as our great- 
est living essayist, he tells a story of being conducted 
by an owner through the rooms and gardens of a Tudor 
house which had been just completed. At every step 
indoors and out was something adequate or charming, 
whether furniture or porcelain or flower or shrub. 
Within were long cool passages where through the 
diamond panes the sunlight splashed on the white walls. 
Without were lawns and vistas of the loveliest colors. 
After leading him over the estate the hostess turned 
and asked, “And now, Mr. Lucas, what do you think 
of it all?’ “I thought many things,” Mr. Lucas con- 
fesses, but the thought which was uppermost was this, 
“You are making it very hard to die.” It is one of the 
poisonous stings of things too sweet. 

Socrates was the greatest figure in ancient Greece. 
He went about without shoes, without a coat, without 
a hat. One morning Xenophon when a mere boy met 
him in a little narrow alley in Athens. The great man 


“I Know Too Well the Poison and Sting” 89 


stopped the lad in the narrow passage and said, “Can 
you tell me, my lad, where those things can be bought 
that are really necessary to human life?” And the 
question sent the boy away wondering why Athens had 
not some shop full of life’s good things instead of stalls 
filled with furniture and fish and sausages and vege- 
tables. How mean and paltry are the goals for which 
men strive! They spend hours dressing and pamper- 
ing the body on which the worms are soon to feed. 
Recently there was published the biography of a great 
man. He was brilliant and loved the limelight. It 
was teas and dinners and pageantries and functions 
and banquets and first nights. There is hardly a line 
im the book about eternal things. How poor and petty 
and theatrical and empty the whole show must seem 
to him now! A man may be buried from head to foot 
in Russian sable and yet be cold. That man is cold 
whose heart is cold. All the pilgrims of the night 
who climbed the steep ascept of Heaven through peril, 
toil and pain, were millionaires. 

Here is a man walking through the woodlands. He 
hears not a whisper from the leafy groves. He says, 
Where are all the songsters that I loved to listen to 
when I was a boy? And yet the air is all astir with 
the music of the thrush and the meadow lark, but 
the man is stone deaf to the ecstasy of their note. 
Strolling into the Metropolitan museum the other day 
I was quite as much interested in the visitors as in the 
works of art. Some were making the place a lazy 
loitering resort; some were in to get out of the wet; 
some were rushing by pell-mell just to tell their friends 


90 When the Morning Wakens 


they had been there. Some were evidently passing 
through the city and had met by telephone appointment 
just to have a visit, not having seen each other per- 
haps for years. The most wonderful creations of 
human genius were all about, but only a few it seemed 
were thrilled with the priceless display. The throngs 
were for the most part curious, listless, heedless. 

It is the tragedy of the life that has no horizon, the 
superficial life. Browning tells of passing a shop 
window one day when he suddenly paused struck with 
the brilliant exhibit. What a wonderful man, he 
thought, must be he who owns these priceless relics! 
If his store is so attractive, what must his home be 
like—this merchant prince. 


“If wide and showy thus the shop, 
What must the habitation prove? 
The true house with no name atop— 
The mansion, distant one remove, 
Once get him off his traffic groove! 


“Some superb palace, parked about 
And gated grandly, built last year: 
The four mile walk to keep off gout 
Or big seat sold by bankrupt peer: 
But then he takes the rail, that’s clear.” 


So he stepped inside, and what a shock when he found 
nothing to warrant all this display. Everything the 
man had was in the window. He slept in a little crib 
back in the corner: 


“I Know Too Well the Poison and Sting” 91 


“At back of all that spread 
Of merchandise, woe’s me, I find 
A hole in the wall where heels by head 
The owner couched, his wares behind 
In cupboard suited to his mind.” 


And the poet goes on to show how poor a man is if 
his life is no bigger than his shop: 


“Because a man has shop to mind 

In time and place, since flesh must live, 
Need spirit lack all life behind, 

All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive, 
All loves except what trade can give? 


“TI want to know a butcher paints, 

A baker rhymes for his pursuit, 
Candlestick maker much acquaints 
His soul with song, or haply mute 
Blows out his brains upon the flute.” 


I. Now the great trouble with the world is just 
here, it does not realize its needs, How all earnest 
teachers run up against this difficulty in the training 
of youth. The great point in training the young is to 
inculcate a desire for the best. The first thing to 
arouse in a scholar’s breast is a sense of lack. The 
successful teacher is the one who can do that. Educa- 
tion is not a matter of cramming: it is a sense of awak- 
ening. When once a young man begins to feel his need 
of an education the battle is more than half won. 


92 When the Morning Wakens 


Psychologists tell us it is the very groundwork of 
the educational life. 

If a father can once get his child to appreciate the 
fact that what he is telling him now, will be useful to 
him by and by, he has succeeded in one of life’s most 
difficult arts. I was told of one father who offered 
his boy of seventeen the choice of a college education 
or a motor car. There is no doubt in anybody’s 
mind what the lad’s choice was. But what a cruel 
wrong to the boy! Surely we owe our children the 
benefit of our experience and our judgment as well as 
our love. And if they do not feel the need of the 
higher things, it is not our function to endeavor to instil 
it? You wish your boy to be musical. And perhaps, 
like most parents, you have a peck of trouble in getting 
him to practise. He detests the drudgery. It is a 
constant nagging, a constant rebellion. The whole 
difficulty being that he does not realize what a joy and 
accomplishment music will be to him in the after years. 
The very moment that begins to dawn, the slavery 
becomes almost sweet. When I was a lad if my 
teachers had told me that music would be one of the 
greatest joys of my life, I should have paid no more 
attention to them than if they had tried to convince 
me that our old cow could sing. 

Basil King has a story which he calls “The Street 
called Straight.” There is a conversation in it between 
two young men. One of them has something in his 
heart which he thinks he ought to do. He is talking it 
over with his friend, and he says: ‘Oh it’s so hard 
to know sometimes just what’s right to do.” “Why 


“I Know Too Well the Poison and Sting” 938 


no, I don’t think so,” the other replies. ‘Well, that’s 
what a great many people say anyway.” ‘A great 
many people say a great many foolish things,” and 
then he adds this bit of wisdom: “It’s always hard to 
know what’s right to do when you don’t want to do it.” 
And Stevenson in one of his stories, “The Master of 
Ballantrae”’ brings out this same idea. There is a 
dialogue between the hero of the story and his servant. 
“Do you think I never have any regrets?” asks the 
Master as he watches old MacKellar packing his trunk. 
“T do not think,” replies the servant, “‘you could be so 
bad a man if you did not have all the machinery to 
make you a good man.” “Ah,” answers the Master, “I 
guess it’s the malady of not wanting.” 

So often this is where the shoe pinches. It is the 
malady of not wanting. And the malady of not want- 
ing is due to an even deeper ailment, the sense of need 
is lacking. Self-satisfaction is the real bar to progress. 
It was the people who trusted in themselves that the 
Master most severely rebuked. They learned nothing 
because they felt they had nothing to learn. The 
publicans and outcasts went into the Kingdom first. 
Katharine Mansfield toiled as few writers have ever 
done to perfect her style. Shortly before her death, 
speaking of how far short she fell of her ideals in her 
stories, she remarked, ‘‘There is not one of them that 
I would dare show to God.” Sir Oliver Lodge tells 
us there are fish that are unconscious of the water. 
And multitudes there are who are unconscious of 
the needs that are oftentimes vital to their very ex- 
istence. 


94. When the Morning Wakens 


The greatest work one can do, let us insist, is to stir 
into activity this slumbering emotion. And it is not 
an easy task. Sometimes the hardest contract before 
the physician is to create an appetite. The patient 
has lost all taste for simple healthful things. The man 
whose thirst has been cooled with wines and cham- 
pagnes and elixirs considers pure mountain water a 
very insipid drink. The trouble with multitudes to-day 
is that they have no edge for spiritual fare. They 
think more of the latest novel than of the story of the 
Kingdom of God. They would much prefer to go to 
Boyle’s thirty acre lot than to the finest sanctuary on 
Manhattan. Have you ever pondered over the indiffer- 
ence of the masses to spiritual things? The latest 
statistics are telling us that seventy-five per cent of our 
male population is outside the churches. They seem to 
feel no need of God at all. They have no conscious- 
ness of His presence. It is the old story, “God is in 
this place and I knew it not.” 

II. Or consider these words from the standpoint 
of world evangelization. The great fact to keep in 
view in all our missionary propaganda is the arousing 
of the people to a sense of their impoverishment. It is 
an acknowledged fact that all modern commerce is in 
a real sense the fruit of Christian missions. The mis- 
sionary goes into the dark interior and develops among 
the people this sense of privation. The history of 
architecture and sanitation and transportation in for- 
eign lands leads us back to the planting of the seeds 
of the Kingdom in these dark places. 


“I Know Too Well the Poison and Sting” 95 


When one takes up such a volume as Ely’s “Missions 
and Science” he realizes that missions not only pro- 
mote commerce; they create it. Every missionary 
journey opens up new markets. It was a missionary 
who first introduced plows into Turkey. It was a 
missionary, the daughter of Dr. Hunter Corbett, who 
first brought lace into China. It was a missionary who 
built the first steamship in the South Sea Islands. I 
have a friend who exports sewing machines to every 
corner of the world. These are hard commercial facts. 
A history of the economic development of the world 
cannot be written without giving a prominent place 
to our missionaries. When a heathen becomes a Chris- 
tian he wants a cake of soap and a toothbrush and a 
pair of shoes and a clean shirt. The savage races of 
the world are beginning to clothe themselves in the 
garments of civilization. Fifty years ago Henry Venn 
the British merchant, stated that when a missionary 
had been abroad twenty years he was worth fifty thou- 
sand pounds annually to British commerce. In China 
for centuries the people depended on a small earthen 
bowl of bean oil in which was inserted a bit of pith 
wick to lighten their homes. It gave but a feeble flick- 
ering flame and millions of eyes were ruined by it in 
the late hours. To-day American kerosene lamps are 
found all over China, 

In periods of hard times we often hear it said that 
the cause is over-production. But would it not be 
nearer the truth to say that the cause is under-demand ? 
It seems quite beside the mark to argue that the reason 
why people are freezing is because there is too much 


96 When the Morning Wakens 


coal, the reason why people are hungry is because there 
is too much wheat, the reason why rents are so high 
is that there are too many houses. The whole mission- 
ary program is an attempt to awaken people to a reali- 
zation of their needs, especially their spiritual needs. 
The heathen world has no consciousness of any 
spiritual emptiness. It is perfectly satisfied with its 
wooden idols. The millions in India and China and 
Siam have no desire for Jesus Christ, not the slightest. 

But the tragedy of the pagan world is that it has a 
deep need that it is not conscious of. It is uttering a 
sob that God can hear, and that every man who loves 
them can hear too. As Phillips Brooks puts it, “The 
unconscious needs of the world are all appeals to God. 
He does not wait to hear the voice of conscious want. 
Mere vacancy is a begging after fullness. Mere pov- 
erty is a prayer for wealth. Mere darkness is a cry for 
light. Whenever a man is capable of being made better 
than he is, God hears the soul of that man crying out 
for the goodness that is his right. Whenever a nation 
is sunk in slavery God hears the soul of that nation 
clamoring for liberty.” 

When David Livingstone went to Africa he found 
the natives unspeakably degraded. And they were per- 
fectly happy in their degradation. They were happier 
in many ways than he was, for he was a lonely man. 
And it was this very sufficiency that stung him to the 
heart and led him to cry out, “Oh Father, help me to 
show these poor people the beauty of Christ so that 
they will desire it.” There always have been a few 
big-hearted souls of this kind in the world. Every 


“I Know Too Well the Poison and Sting’’ 97 


wrong is a personal appeal to them. Every hungry 
child makes them hungry too. They cannot sleep if 
a neighbor is cold or naked. No imagination is so 
sacred as that which puts one in a sufferer’s place. The 
greatest triumph of the mental-picture art comes 
when the mind can put itself in the position of the 
widow and orphan, when it can feel the lash on the 
flank of the helpless dumb brute, when it can groan 
with those that agonize and weep with those that weep. 

H. L. Mencken in one of his essays gives us his con- 
clusions about life. In order to be happy he tells us 
one needs three things. First to be well fed and un- 
hounded by sordid cares. Secondly to be filled with a 
comfortable feeling of superiority over the masses of 
our fellow men, And thirdly to be delicately and 
unceasingly amused according to one’s taste. There 
are thousands to-day whose philosophy is a good deal 
of that brand. And it is a philosophy worse than the 
ethics of the jungle, for in the darkest jungle one is 
often surprised with a little gleam of unselfishness. Its 
right name would be hog philosophy. Nothing could 
be further removed from the Christian appeal. 

The Christian appeal is a heart appeal. It is from 
the heart and it is to the heart. Its law is the law of 
thoughtfulness and kindness. It aims to feed the hun- 
gry and clothe the naked and help the cripple and lead 
the blind and teach the ignorant and hunt out the lost. 
And if people do not know they are blind and igno- 
rant and lost, the burden is all the greater, the call is 
all the louder. To make men see how much they miss 
—that is the task. To implant in their hearts a desire 


98 When the Morning Wakens 


for the things that are precious to you—that is the 
problem. And what a vexing problem it often is! 
You ask a man why he is not a Christian. He will 
say to you, “Well I feel no need of being a Christian.” 
His answer is frank and often it is sincere. But you 
return, “My dear sir, we are not always conscious of 
our needs. Below that outer self of yours there is a 
deeper self and that deeper self is hungry. You may 
not know your need, but that does not prove it is not 
there.” Man is a child of God; he is made like God; 
he needs God. He needs God as a little baby needs 
its mother though it be so little that it feels no need of 
a mother. 

III. Or consider once more this question in the 
light of our civil and political responsibilities. What 
is the great trouble with our patriotism to-day? It is 
this, is it not, that so many citizens do not realize the 
obligations of their citizenship. America’s real menace 
is the menace of the citizen who is indifferent. He 
says, “Well, I’m only one in a hundred million. One 
does not count for anything. One vote won’t make 
any difference either way. One party is about as bad 
as the other anyway. I don’t feel that I’m essential. 
Let my neighbor attend to the school, the municipality, 
the jury, the primary, the ballot box.” Strange how 
men will fight for the franchise when it is denied them, 
but the very moment it is theirs they seem to care 
little about it. 

In our country we share the responsibilities of 
government. It is the electors that make the laws. 
The very fate of democracy is bound up with this feel- 


“I Know Too Well the Poison and Sting” 99 


ing of moral obligation. Self-government perishes 
when it dies. When one remembers how many battles 
have been fought, and how much blood has been spilled, 
and how many centuries it took to gain our liberties, 
it does seem more than strange, almost puzzling indeed, 
to find millions here in America who ignore them. 
We were born in a land that cost the blood of patriots 
and the courage of pioneers and yet in our last Presi- 
dential election only about fifty per cent of the qualified 
vote of our country was registered. The danger con- 
fronting our political life to-day, I insist, is its irre- 
sponsibility. There is not so much peril in our violation 
of law as in our insensibility to our duties. Men are 
losing their independent personality. Hardly anything 
shocks us morally any more. Que fuerunt Vitia 
Mores Sunt. When Pascal once asked his pupils what 
made a fluid rise in an empty tube they said it was 
because Nature abhorred a vacuum. Pascal laughed at 
the answer, adding that Nature abhorred nothing. 
Then he went on to explain how it was the pressure 
of the atmosphere that caused the fluids to rise. And 
it is the lift of popular feeling that is going to rectify 
most of our public wrongs, Criticism will not do it. 
Abuse and fault finding and censure will not do it. 
Nothing will do it but the pressure of public opinion. 

Our liberties have come to us far too easily. We did 
not have to fight for them and suffer for them and die 
for them as did our Fathers. It is again one of 


“The poisonous stings 
Of things too sweet.” 


VIII 


“'There’s a Star to Guide the Humble” 


“We have done that which it was our duty 
to do.” 


Luke 17:10. 


THE idea being, we have done nothing to brag of, we 
have simply done what we ought to have done. Or as 
Moffat translates it, “We have only done our duty.” 


“T slept and dreamed that life was Beauty, 
I woke and found that life was Duty.” 


There was once a famous signal given by Lord Nelson, 
“England expects every man to do his duty.” Nelson’s 
own lieutenant tells the story: “His lordship came to 
me on deck a little before noon and said, ‘““Mr. Pascoe, I 
wish to say to the fleet that England confides that 
every man will do his duty, and you must be quick, 
because I have another signal to give which is for 
close action.” I replied, “If your lordship will permit 
me to change one word it will be obeyed more quickly. 
Instead of confides I would suggest expects. You see 


the word expects is in their vocabulary but confides 
100 


“There’s a Star to Guide the Humble” 101 


would need to be explained.” He replied in haste, “‘All 
right, Pascoe, do it at once.” And so the signal was 
sent flying from the flagship, “England expects every 
man to do his duty.” And every man didit. It found 
an echo in the breast of every sailor. And the battle 
of Trafalgar was won. It is worth noting too that the 
last words the great Admiral himself spoke were, 
“Thank God I have done my duty.” 

Some years ago there was an accident on one of our 
Southern railways, a few miles from Nashville. There 
were many lives lost, but the engineer’s life was 
miraculously saved, and when he crawled out from 
underneath his engine well-nigh crazed with grief, he 
had a yellow strip of paper in his hand. It was his 
telegraph orders. And as he rushed frantically up and 
down amid the confusion, he kept saying to himself, 
“Tt wasn’t my fault, here are my orders, I simply 
obeyed, I simply did my duty.” One is reminded of 
Lord Tennyson’s ballad in which he narrates how 
Sir Richard Grenville found himself in his one little 
vessel fighting for dear life, surrounded by the whole 
Spanish fleet of fifty-three ships: 


«Sink me the ship, Master Gunner—sink her, split 
her in twain! 
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of 
Spain!’ 
And the gunner said, ‘Ay, ay,’ but the seamen made 
reply: 
“We have wives, we have wives, and the Lord hath 
spared our lives, 


102 When the Morning Wakens 


We will make the Spaniards promise, if we yield to 
let us go; 

We shall live to fight again and to strike another 
blow.’ 

And the lion lay there dying, and they yielded to the 
foe. 

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore 
him then, 

Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard 
caught at last, 

And they praised him to his face with their courtly 
foreign grace; 

But he rose upon their decks and he cried: 

‘I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man 
and true; 

I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do: 

With joyful spirit I, Sir Richard Grenville, die!— 

And he fell upon their decks, and he died.” 


Duty is a good old Anglo-Saxon word. We use it 
every day. Are we quite sure we understand just what 
it means? Duty is giving another what is his due. 
It is paying what we owe. It is discharging a debt. 
If we owe our fellow man anything that means the 
thing belongs to him. I ought means I owe; ought 
is the preterit of owe and if I do not pay what I owe in 
the realm of morals, I am just as lax as if I were not 
to pay what I owe in the matter of dollars and cents. 
Some there are who have extremely low ideas of the 
ethics of a debt. They look upon debt as a small 


“'There’s a Star to Guide the Humble” 103 


matter. Men who would scorn to steal do not hesi- 
tate oftentimes to repudiate their debts. 

But the fact is, a debtor who does not meet his obli- 
gations, if he is able to, is just a simple thief. That is 
a lesson that many need to learn. God’s law says: 
“Pay what thou owest.” Paul says: “Owe no man 
anything.” Avoid running into debt, young man. 
Debt is a millstone around the neck. Never incur any 
financial obligation that you do not see your way clear 
to discharge. Pay as you go. No wiser words were 
ever written than the words that Horace Greeley wrote: 


“Hunger, cold, rags, hard work, contempt, suspicion, 
unjust reproach, are disagreeable and debt is infinitely 
worse than them all. And if it had pleased God to 
spare either or both of my sons to be the support and 
solace of my declining years, the lesson which I should 
have earnestly sought to impress upon them is, ‘Never 
run into debt! Avoid pecuniary obligation as you 
would pestilence or famine. If you have but fifty 
cents and can get no more for a week, buy a peck of 
corn, parch it and live on it, rather than owe any man 
a dollar!” 


Debt and duty have the same root. There is a world 
of meaning in these words when we peep below the 
surface. They imply right and wrong. The very 
moment we begin to talk about doing our duty, we are 
in the court of imperatives. The word recognizes the 
supremacy of conscience. Some languages have no 
word for home in their vocabulary but no language 


104 When the Morning Wakens 


lacks a word for must or ought. Once when Jesus 
said He was going to Jerusalem where He was to suf- 
fer many things, Peter took Him and began to rebuke 
Him, saying, “Be it far from Thee, Lord.” But 
Jesus said “I must go.” He was angry with Peter. 
He uses the very words which He had used to the 
tempter in the wilderness. Peter was an offense in 
counseling such a course. When aman says he must 
do a thing, there is not much use arguing with him. 
You cannot convince him that he is foolish in doing it, 
and even if you could, he will likely do it anyway. 
Now the word duty is a precious stone of many 
facets. Consider the duty we owe to ourselves. When 
Fred Denison Maurice gave a series of lectures on con- 
science at the University of Cambridge, his first lecture 
was on the little word “I.” Because, said he, behind a 
man’s conscience there is his ego, his personality. And 
no truth is vital to a man until he has made it a part 
of his ego. We must not run away with the notion 
that we have no duties to ourselves. That is not true. 
I owe it to myself to be honest, to be decent, to keep 
my word, to play the game fair, to be loyal to a con- 
tract. I owe these things to myself, because for 
one thing it is the only way that I can have self-respect 
and peace of mind. What a torture to live a whole 
lifetime with oneself and not command one’s own 
respect! We owe it to ourselves to be loyal to the 
laws of truth and right so far as we understand them. 
No man can be honest with his God until he is first 
honest with himself. It is absolutely vital to be loyal 
to one’s own convictions. ‘These can be trampled on 


“There’s a Star to Guide the Humble” 105 


only at the risk of moral wreck. We must let nothing 
come between us and the truth. 

It was only yesterday that a young man walked into 
my study. He said, “I don’t like my job.” “Why 
don’t you like it?’ ‘‘Well, I have to misstate things 
and prevaricate.’ “Is that so? I wouldn't play 
crooked for any man.” “Well if I don’t, I'll lose my 
place. They’d say to me, all right, there’s the door, 
there are others.” “How old are you?” “I’m twenty- 
eight.” “Well, I’d rather walk outside that door and 
take with me twenty-eight years of honest pride than 
deliberately lie for any bunch that would ask me to do 
their dirty work.” This morning he threw up his 
place and came back saying, “Well, I’m down and out; 
I took my hat and walked out the door.” He lost 
his job but he saved his Christian chivalry. And don’t 
forget it, young man, he will be a winner in the end. 

Then there is our duty to our fellow man. No 
man can save his life alone. No man can shut him- 
self up in monastic seclusion, and say my fellow men 
are nothing to me. I have a family and a home: I 
owe certain duties to it. I have children: I owe every- 
thing to them. I have a wife: I owe a world of weal 
to her. I promised to love her and comfort her, and 
honor and keep her in sickness and in health till death 
do us part. Marriage is not a civil contract: it is a 
divine contract. Marriage is a sacrament. Surely 
an obligation assumed at a church altar is as binding 
as one assumed at the bank or the store. Down on the 
Stock Exchange if you lift your finger or nod your 
head the gesture is obligatory. But the marriage knot 


106 When the Morning Wakens 


is not a matter of lifting a finger. It is tied, one would 
think, with links of steel. There are promises and 
prayers and pledges and rings and clasping of hands 
and witnesses and signatures in black and white and 
then the seal of the church, and yet it is discarded as 
easily and flippantly sometimes as an old faded frock. 

Then I have a church. I promised to support it 
and persevere in its communion. It was a definite 
obligation. Am I keeping my covenant bond? How 
easily and indifferently church members ignore their 
oaths. Religious vows make a strangely feeble im- 
pression to-day upon the average man. 

And then I have a country and a government to sup- 
port. Surely my duty to the State and her institutions 
is a serious thing. The trouble with our land to-day is 
that so many hold their political duties so lightly. 
There is a big account against us here and if we have 
a spark of honor we will want to repay it. We are 
what we are because of “boundless benefactions be- 
stowed upon us by invisible donors.” Hlow did we get 
our freedom? to mention but one thing. We got it 
because there were men who dared to speak out what 
they felt to be true, even though they saw the axe and 
the block in front of them while they were saying it. 
Every morning when we turn on the faucet in the bath 
room we are drawing water from the Catskills 200 
miles away. And just so, we owe a mighty debt to 
those grand heroes, who long centuries ago struck the 
rock, as Moses did, and let loose a stream of blessing 
down the ages for you and me. 

And then, and greatest of all, there is our duty to 


‘“There’s a Star to Guide the Humble’ 107 


our God. And what is our duty to Him? We owe 
Him reverence; we owe Him love; we owe Him the 
joyful worship of our hearts; we owe Him trust; we 
owe Him obedience. The only way to know the will 
of God is to do it. Principal Jacks says, ‘The wisest 
man will never understand what duty is until he does 
it.’ Do the duty that lies nearest and then the next 
step will be clear. For duty is made up of little 
things; it is a mosaic. Your beautiful mosaic consists 
of tiny bits of colored glass. And just so duty re- 
solves itself into a multitude of seemingly trifling 
things. Ernst Haeckel’s definition of duty is, ‘Duty 
is a long series of phyletic modifications of the phe- 
nomena of the cortex.” Which reminds one of the 
ambiguous remark attributed to a certain lady of sud- 
den fortune, ‘Well, you’ve said a mouthful.” How 
much more satisfying is Wordsworth’s line, “Stern 
daughter of the Voice of God.” To the one duty is 
simply a material arrangement of atoms in the outer 
layer of the brain; to the other it is the Voice of God 
in the soul, 


“Courage brother! do not stumble, 
Though thy path be dark as night; 
There’s a star to guide the humble— 

Trust in God and do the right. 


“Let the road be rough or dreary, 
And its end far out of sight; 
Foot it bravely, strong or weary— 
Trust in God and do the right. 


108 When the Morning Wakens 


“Perish policy or cunning; 
Perish all that fears the light; 
Whether losing, whether winning, 
Trust in God and do the right. 


“Some will hate thee, some will love thee; 
Some will flatter, some will slight; 
Cease from men and look above thee— 

Trust in God and do the right.” 


Sometimes men say, “Well I don’t just believe as 
you do: my religion is to try and do my duty: Duty is 
my God.” And one always feels like saying to such 
people, “That’s all very well, but did you ever think 
of this: Duty is only a word. And like all words, 
the thing is dead.” If you fall down and worship duty 
you're only worshiping a dead image, an idol. The 
breath that puts life into the word and makes it throb 
and blush is the Infinite and Eternal Jehovah. The 
very beginning of your duty is your duty to Him. 
Duty bows down to and takes its orders from nothing 
under God’s blue vault, excepting the Eternal Author 
of the Word Himself. It is because I believe in the 
voice of God that I believe in the supremacy of duty. 
Right means a straight line. Wrong means a crooked 
line. And the question is, Who drew the line? That 
old grim gruff Scotchman, Carlyle, said when on the 
brink of the grave: ‘The older I grow, the more I 
feel the truth of what my mother taught me, ‘What 
is the chief end of man?’ ‘The chief end of man is 
to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.’ ” 





“There’s a Star to Guide the Humble” 109 


Sometimes the question is asked, Ought a man to re- 
ceive any credit for doing his duty. I owe my grocery 
man $20 and some day I go down and settle the bill. 
Am I entitled to a special vote of thanks? Am I 
to boast of my honesty? Is a man entitled to any 
glory because he tells the truth? This was the trouble 
with the scribes and Pharisees. They bragged about 
doing their duty. The spirit of Jesus is different. 
“We are unprofitable servants: we have only done that 
which it was our duty to do.” There is an old familiar 
story told of the Duke of Wellington. It will be re- 
membered that duty was the Iron Duke’s favorite 
word. When he died Tennyson wrote an ode to his 
memory, 


“Not once or twice in our rough island story 
The path of Duty was the way to Glory.” 


Well this story goes that he was out hunting one day 
when he came to a gate. A farmer’s boy was at the 
gate. The Duke came galloping up and was about 
to pass through. The lad jumped in front of his horse, 
saying, ‘““My orders are to let nobody pass.” “But, 
my boy, you don’t know me: I am the Duke of Well- 
ington.” “No matter who you are, these are my or- 
ders.” “Bravo,” said the great soldier, “you are the 
right kind of a boy,” and he slipped a sovereign into his 
hand. Was he not entitled to some praise? Well- 
ington evidently thought he was. 

We hear much these days of the moral equivalent 
of war, but there is also the moral equivalent of duty. 
The church is moving heaven and earth to-day trying 


110 When the Morning Wakens 


to hit on something that will take the place of old- 
fashioned duty. She is appealing to sentiment and 
popularity, to fashion, to expediency, to entertain- 
ment, to amusement. But it must be confessed that 
none of these things work. They all lack the dynamic of 
the old eternal verities. God says, this is your duty. 
Do it. Do it win or lose; do it sink or swim; do it live 
or die. No matter what the consequences, only do it. 
Discipline is the note that needs to be rung to-day. 
Rights are sometimes to be surrendered but duties are 
always to be done. Jesus never insisted on His rights. 
His whole career was one of self-emptying, self-abase- 
ment, self-surrender. “Being in the form of God 
He counted not His equality with God a thing to be 
grasped at but emptied Himself and being found in 
fashion as a man He humbled Himself and became obe- 
dient unto death.” Perhaps there has never been a 
simpler or more satisfying definition of what it means 
to do one’s duty than in the celebrated saying of Hux- 
ley, “To do the thing we ought to do at the time 
we ought to do it whether we feel like doing it or not.” 

Our English literature can boast two immortal 
poems on Duty. One by Wordsworth and one by Mrs. 
Browning. Wordsworth in his great ode calls duty a 
stern thing: “Stern daughter of the Voice of God.” 
But then he goes on, Duty has a gentle, lovely side 
too. 


“Stern lawgiver, 
Yet dost thou wear the Godhead’s most benignant 
grace, 


“There’s a Star to Guide the Humble” 111 


Nor know we anything so fair, as is the smile upon 
thy face. 

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 

And fragrance in thy footing treads. 

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 

And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh 
and strong. 


“The sweetest lives are those to duty wed, 

Whose deeds, both great and small, 

Are close knit strands of an unbroken thread, 

Where love ennobles all. 

The world may sound no trumpets, ring no bells, 

The book of life no shining record tells. 

Thy love shall chant its own beatitudes 

After its own life-working. <A child’s kiss 

Set on thy sighing lips shall make thee glad; 

A poor man served by thee shall make thee rich; 

A sick man helped by thee shall make thee strong.” 
(Mrs. Browning) 


1B:¢ 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 


“Come now and let us reason together, 
saith the Lord.” 
Isaiah 1:18 


“We must be on our guard,” says Bishop Butler, 
“lest we be led to vilify reason, which is indeed the 
only faculty which we have to judge concerning any- 
thing, even revelation itself.”” The faculty of reason, 
he goes on, “is the candle of the Lord within us.” 
These words of the great bishop are worth laying to 
heart. God did not give us His Word to make think- 
ing unnecessary but rather to stimulate it. In his Gif- 
ford lectures Sir Henry Jones says, “The church must 
learn to represent its beliefs not as dogmas but as 
truths, which it challenges a disbelieving world to put 
to the test and to the hardest test.”’ 

Is the Bible hostile to honest reason? Let the 
book speak for itself. “Give a reason,’ says St. 
Peter “for the hope that is in you.” ‘Stand still,” 
says the prophet Samuel, “that I may reason with you 
before the Lord concerning all his righteous acts.” 


St. Paul never hesitated to wield this weapon of the 
112 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 118 


human mind. “He reasoned of righteousness.” ‘Come 
now and let us reason together,” saith Jehovah. 

What is reason? Reason is the faculty that takes 
the raw material of knowledge and formulates it into 
a system. It works by the law of cause and effect. 
Why does the wind blow? Why does the sun rise 
and set? Why do the tides rise and fall? Why does 
the coal burn? Why does the ice melt? What makes 
the ocean salty? Every time our lips say why, where- 
fore, because, we are moving in the realm of the rea- 
son. Given certain conditions what will be the con- 
sequences ?—It is reason that figures that out. I was 
led through a factory last summer where they manu- 
facture alloys. These alloys consist mostly of lead 
and tin and antimony. The manager said, “Everything 
is mathematical in here. The proportions are iron- 
clad. We test everything to the smallest decimal. For 
instance, in making type metal if the antimony is left 
out, the type will not print. In making solder, if copper 
is introduced, the mixture is worthless.” Uncle Sam 
puts one per cent copper in all gold money to make 
it hard. Gold by itself is soft. The coin must be 
hardened with alloy. If you want hydrochloric acid, 
it is necessary to bring together one part of hydrogen 
and thirty-five and a half of chlorine. Thirty-six will 
not do. There is no guess work in a chemical formula. 
It is founded on reason. All science is based on reason. 

And man is a reasonable being. ‘‘What a piece of 
work is man,” says Shakespeare, “how noble in rea- 
son, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how 
express and admirable! In action how like an angel, 


114 When the Morning Wakens 


1? 


in apprehension how like a God!” It is because of 
reason that man is superior to the lower animals. It 
is because of reason that he rules over them. They are 
greater in instinct; their marvelous instinct baffles us. 
The instinct of the bee and the beaver is well-nigh un- 
canny, but it is in no way progressive. There is no 
effort after improvement. There is nothing like moral 
aspiration in the hive nor any effort to better the com- 
munity. Beavers are surprisingly co-operative crea- 
tures but they have never manifested any co-operation 
along moral lines. There is no genius whatever for 
betterment. Bees build their hives to-day the same pre- 
cisely as in the days of Virgil and Pliny. A 
cat loves fish but a cat “has never been known to use a 
fishing line.” The lion has never been seen to use any 
weapon save his paw and his tongue and his teeth. 

We say of a man that he is reasonable. We mean 
he is amenable to reason. If you reason with him you 
can bring him to a sensible way of looking at things. 
Sometimes we argue with a man and say, “You are not 
reasonable, sir.” Maybe he isa special pleader, perhaps 
a lawyer pleading for his client, perhaps a debater 
laboring to make the best out of a poor case. For alas, 
even dialecticians are not always reasonable. But the 
normal man under normal conditions is governed by 
reason. “How noble in reason!” You know, generally 
speaking, where to find him. You know how he will 
act under certain conditions and what he will think 
and say. 

Then we live in a reasonable world—a world in 
which everything can be brought to the touchstone of 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 115 


reason. Not only is man reasonable; the world is 
reasonable. We can always bank on the sun and the 
stars and the tides. Since the earth began “summer 
and winter, seed-time and harvest, day and night have 
not ceased.” When once we know what any element 
will do, we can count on its doing that very thing 
always. We know what to expect from water and fire 
and gas and electricity. What happened yesterday 
will happen to-day and it will happen again to-morrow. 
“Children are born with ten little fingers, ten little 
toes, two little eyes and one little nose.” The regu- 
larity is monotonous. Nature is always law abiding. 
As Joseph Henry used to say, “If you ask Nature the 
same old question, she will always give you the same 
old answer.” I have just been reading of Dr, Banting 
and his discovery of insulin, how he labored for years 
to find it, how he failed and started all over again, 
always working on the assumption that the laws of 
nature are real laws and can be absolutely depended 
on never to play tricky. 

This unchangeableness of the physical order is the 
solid rock on which science builds her throne. There 
is never any confusion here. It is one of the everlast- 
ing facts. Nature never goes back on us, never plays 
any jokes. There are no surprises in nature. Nature 
is like a machine. Given so and so you can expect so 
and so. Given so much gas you can expect so much 
mileage. The piston will rise and fall just so often. 
We know precisely what it will do. There are no sur- 
prises about an automobile if the thing is working 


116 When the Morning Wakens 


right. If it is not working right it is chock full of 
surprises. 

And our faith is a reasonable thing. That is our 
terminus ad quem. One year ago in our Men’s As- 
sociation we had a symposium on “How religion can be 
made acceptable to the modern mind.” We are always 
talking about the modern mind. People speak of the 
modern mind as if it were a recent invention like the 
radio or the victrola, or the self-starter or the car- 
buretor. What is the modern mind? Let us be scien- 
tific. Is it any different from the mind of Isaiah or 
the mind of Plato or the mind of Paul?” 

Most students of the Bible to-day are satisfied that 
religion does not have to be made reasonable to the 
modern mind. They feel that it is reasonable already. 
There is nothing more reasonable than Christianity 
when it is correctely presented. Brierley used to say 
that half the difficulties which the average man finds 
in the Christian religion arise from faults of state- 
ment. When Christianity is rightly stated it wins men. 
The danger is lest we be jogging along with old worn- 
out machinery and shut our eyes to new truth. The 
Bishop of London, going on the platform to address a 
group of men at Victoria Park, overheard one man 
say: “How much better if the reverend gentleman 
would only tell us something to help our reasons in- 
stead of asking us to swallow a lot of stuff that he 
doesn’t believe himself.” 

(a) Consider then some reasonable facts about our 
faith, facts that would be accepted in any American 
court of justice. Take its conception of God. That is 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 117 


the fundamental postulate of every religion. What 
has it to say of the cause of all things? Is a belief 
in a Supreme Being or a fortuitous concourse of atoms 
the more sane explanation of the cosmos? This is a 
question for reason to decide. There is a poem in 
literature, and something like this is how it runs: 


“The world rolls round forever like a mill, 
It grinds out life and death, and good and ill, 
It has no purpose, heart, or mind or will. 


“While air of space and Time’s full river flow, 
The mill must blindly whirl unresting so, 
It may be wearing out, but who can know? 


“Man might know one thing were his sight less dim, 
That it whirls, not to suit his petty whim, 
That it is quite indifferent to him. 


“Nay, doth it use him harshly, as he saith? 
It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, 
Then grinds him back into eternal death.” 


Now is that reasonable to you? Cardinal Newman 
once remarked, “If I looked into a mirror and did not 
see my face, I should have the same feeling as if I 
were to look into the living world and saw no reflection 
of its Creator. And that reminds us of Jean Henri 
Fabre the distinguished naturalist. A visitor asked 
him, “Do you believe in God, Mr. Fabre?” To which 
he replied, “I cannot say I believe in God: I see God: 


118 When the Morning Wakens 


You could take my skin from my body more easily than 
my faith in God.” | 

Just before the World War, Franklin K. Lane, 
writing to a friend, used these words: “Mind you I 
have no religion: I attend no church. I deal every day 
with hard questions of economics. But,” he went on, 
“Wwe are coming to recognize spiritual forces, and I 
put my hope for the future, not in a reduction of the 
high cost of living, nor in any scheme of government, 
but in the recognition by the people that after all there 
is a God in the world.” 

Then if we believe in God, what kind of a being is 
He? Is He a God made in our own image? Whom 
do we really worship? James says one may believe in 
God and yet be a monster. Dean Inge in one of his 
essays says, “The really important question is not 
whether God exists but what we mean when we use 
that word.” Perhaps the greatest tragedy of history is 
that so many professing Christians misrepresent the 
character of God. When Homer Lane asked the chil- 
dren of his reformatory one day what they would do 
if God were to come and visit them, they all agreed 
they would run away and hide. Who that has read the 
life of Maxim Gorky can help realizing the evil ef- 
fects of a false conception of God. It is truly a grim 
and terrible tale. The father died when Maxim was 
still a baby. So the mother took the child to the home 
of her parents. The grandfather was a stern, cold, 
cruel man. He would punish the growing boy un- 
mercifully. He was most particular on going to the 
confessional. He would talk about God but his God 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 119 


was an awful creature. The old man’s God filled the 
child with terror. Can we wonder that Maxim Gorky 
grew up to have a hatred of everything religious! 

You could not worship a Being who created this 
world but who looks down on its sorrow and misery 
from the hills of glory unmoved; 


“Grinding out life and death, and good and ill, 
No purpose, heart, or mind, or will.” 


If God be not a God of love, a most damaging blow 
has been inflicted on the Deity. Faith is not belief in a 
number of dead dogmas. Faith is having fellowship 
with our Heavenly Father and with His Son. The 
Christian conception is that anything attributed to God 
which is unlike Jesus, must necessarily be false. Jesus 
came to reveal the Father, to tell us what God is like. 
He is more than a teacher of the Divine Wisdom; 
He is a revealer of the Divine love. 

(b) Take another postulate. Consider this fact, 
that our faith can be tested by experience. That is 
how every scientific discovery is verified. It is first 
conceived by the imagination and then it is verified by 
experience. Could anything be fairer than that? And 
surely the testimony of all the saints and apostles 
and prophets and martyrs must count for something. 
It cannot be possible that all down the ages the mil- 
lions who have given their witness to the power of an 
endless life are all wrong. 

Note too that when it is said a thing is reasonable, 
this does not mean that it can be scientifically proven. 


120 When the Morning Wakens 


We cannot prove infinity because our tape line is too 
short. We do not know that the universe is infinite. 
We can only say that everywhere we go (and we can 
go bewilderingly far), the thing is still there. 

The poet Coleridge once said something to this ef- 
fect: ‘Don’t bother about the evidences of Christian- 
ity: Just try it.” Step inside the circle. The storied 
window of the cathedral is a hodge-podge from with- 
out. Only when the visitor passes in does the glass 
glow and the figures become clear. And the Christian 
faith is something one must see from within. Words 
cannot express the visions and emotions of the soul. 
It is like trying to describe the odor of a strange un- 
familiar flower. Language fails to give a clear im- 
pression. President Pritchett traveling in the Alps said 
toa boy: “Where is Kanderstag?” The boy replied, 
“T don’t know, but yon’s the road to it.” And this 
is the answer the Christian gives. Christ is the way. 
Follow that path and it will lead home. Only by per- 
sonal experience can these things be proven. There is 
a great seed firm in Reading, England. And their big 
advertisement is that they allow no seeds to be sent 
out until they are first tested on their own farm. Then 
they recommend them. Do you know any more rea- 
sonable test of anything than to be able to say, “Well 
now if you doubt my word, take it and try it; we’ve 
tried it and it works. 

The Christian faith works. That is what makes it 
convincing. The great argument against infidelity is 
that it makes life hard and difficult. Life is hard any- 
way. Nobody wants a philosophy at the back of it 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 121 


that makes it any harder. Christianity helps us to live 
the kind of life we know we ought to live. There are 
thousands and tens of thousands of people who believe 
that Christianity is true but who have never put it to 
the test in their own lives. 

When Spurgeon was once pressed why he did not 
speak out in defense of the Bible, he exclaimed, “De- 
fend the Bible! I should as soon think of defending 
a lion. Unchain the book and it will defend itself.” 

Imagine yourself listening to some great artist—a 
violinist let us suppose—and imagine some one trying 
to explain the mechanism of the performance. He 
talks about point and counterpoint, intervals, dimin- 
ished sevenths, and classic balance and the whole har- 
monic structure. You say to him, “Stop that chatter- 
ing; I do not want to hear about classic balance, this 
man is speaking to my soul.” One can fully appre- 
ciate what Cardinal Newman once replied. He was 
asked to debate Christianity with some famous agnos- 
tic. “All right,” said the Cardinal, “I will give the 
agnostic all the time he wants and then when he is 
through I will simply ask some artist to play Schu- 
bert’s ‘Ave Maria’ or ‘Songs without words.’” And 
who has not experienced that very thing in his own 
life. I have listened to the breakers rolling in on the 
beach in a storm. I have been moved to wonder and 
speechless delight watching a sunset on the shores of 
the Pacific. I have stood on the top of a lofty moun- 
tain and been filled with awe, and consternation almost. 
And if I were asked what it all meant I could not have 
told you. I could not have given any of these feelings 


122 When the Morning Wakens 


_a logical expression, All I could say is, and all I can 
now say is, they lifted me up somehow or other and 
Racelt, 


“O world, thou choosest not the better part! 

It is not wisdom to be only wise, 
And on the inward vision close the eyes; 

But it is wisdom to believe the heart. 

Columbus found a world but had no chart 
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies. 
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise 

Was all his science, and his only art.” 


(c) Take still another great doctrine. Instance the 
doctrine of repentance. The heart of the prophet in 
this first chapter is just full of the idea of repentance. 
Repentance is an instinct. It carries with it the idea 
that what has happened ought not to have happened and 
need not have happened. We are sorry that it hap- 
pened and we are determined that it will not happen 
again. Isn’t it a reasonable thing that when a man 
begins a new life that he should be genuinely sorry 
for the old life. And true repentance is a searching 
radical thing. It goes down to the roots. ‘Wash 
you, make you clean, put away the evil of your do- 
ings’ the prophet insists in the verse preceding. ‘Cease 
to do evil, learn to do well.” What good is all your 
sacrifices and burnt offerings and vain oblations if your 
hands are red with blood? “It is an abomination to me 
saith the Lord.’”’ The whole chapter is a call to re- 
pentance. God loves righteousness. He hates iniquity. 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 123 


What is the good of our religious fervor if our repent- 
ance is not genuine? We profess to be Christians. 
How about our business? Is it Christian? How 
about our homes? Are they Christian? How about 
our lives? Are they Christian? The power of the 
church depends far more on the justice and truthful- 
ness and righteousness of its members than on the 
soundness of its creed or the warmth of its religious 
zeal. If the people who come to this church sabbath 
after sabbath, if they prove themselves to be no better 
than the people who do not come, then woe to us; 
our fellowship is a failure. 

(d) Or take once more the final purpose of it all— 
the restoration of the wanderer—is that not a reason- 
able thing? To bring back home those who have gone 
astray. To take the scarlet out of the heart and make 
it white! Could anything be more appealing to reason 
than that? “Come let us reason together; Though 
your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow.” 
The reddest thing in the world is blood and the whitest 
is snow. Red as blood: white as snow! 

One of the most frequent complaints of the Bible 
is that people do not reason things out. “Israel doth 
not know, my people do not consider.” That strain 
is heard all through the prophets. Perhaps the com- 
monest simile in Scripture for man is that of a sheep. 
“All we like sheep have gone astray’’ and that means 
silly sheep. Ohif men would only sit down and think! 

Those who deny the doctrine of forgiveness are the 
very ones who belittle the Christian doctrine of sin. 
Sin is the center of the discussion. ‘Forgiveness,’ says 


124. When the Morning Wakens 


Bernard Shaw, “is a beggar’s refuge; we must pay our 
debts.” George Eliot regarded forgiveness as unthink- 
able. In ‘‘Middlemarch” retribution is the whole theme 
and motive of that great work of art. Indeed the ob- 
jections to forgiveness to-day are ethical rather than 
intellectual. There are no intellectual difficulties any 
more. It is not right, we are told, that there should 
be any escape from the inexorable law that what we 
sow we must reap. The objection is moral. 

The answer to that is that forgiveness is a personal 
act and has nothing to do with law. We see it among 
lovers and friends. We witness it every day among 
the members of families in their personal dealings with 
each other. That sweet blessed human fact cannot be 
lost sight of. And if an earthly parent can grant for- 
giveness to his child, are we going to deny that same 
privilege to the Heavenly Parent? To be sure if the 
world is a mere mechanism, forgiveness is not possible, 
but the eternal teaching of our faith is that the world 
is not a mere mechanism. The teaching of the Cross 
is that love is above all codes, and the heart of the 
Eternal is most wonderfully kind. Here is the ‘“‘Scar- 
let Letter’—that great classic of the inner life. And 
the final word of that wonderful drama is, not that 
an ironclad law binds us and that we must obey it or 
be crushed, but that “love reigns at the heart of law 
and that a pentitent may win his way back to peace.” 

Vachel Lindsay in a great burst of imagination pic- 
tures General Booth entering the heavenly city and 
this is the theme of his song—forgiveness. “Are you 
washed in the blood of the Lamb?” And when a 


“Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet” 125 


greater than Booth stepped up the golden pavements 
to meet his Maker I am sure it was the whole theme 
of his song too, for it was the burden of his whole 
apostolic ministry: ‘Who hath delivered us from the 
power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom 
of His dear Son, in whom we have redemption through 
His blood, even the forgiveness of our sins.” 


“Booth led boldly with his big bass drum, 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 
The saints smiled gravely and they said “He’s come.” 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 


“Walking lepers followed rank on rank 
Lurching bravos from the ditches dank, 
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath 
Unwashed legions with the ways of death— 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 


“And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer 
He saw his Master thro’ the flag-filled air. 
Christ came gently with a robe and crown 
For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down. 


“He saw King Jesus—they were face to face, 
And he knelt a weeping in that holy place. 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” 


¢ 
~~ 


x 


“IT Do Not Ask to See the Distant Scene” 


“I have yet many things to say unto you 
but ye cannot bear them now.” 


John 16:12 


THE Master is here teaching the progressive charac- 
ter of divine revelation. It is part of the great law 
of evolution. There is a lot of discussion going 
on to-day over this question of evolution. Many 
are wotried over it. But the fact of evolution is not 
in doubt any more among scholars. They do not all 
accept it as applying to the human body, but few 
question that it operates in every other, or pretty 
nearly every other, department of life. It is God’s 
chosen method of working. Things mature in this 
world by growth. 

Everything about us is an evolution. Everything is 
changing. A thing that does not change is not a living 
thing. One who in the course of his life has not 
changed some of his views of Christian truth can 
hardly be said to have lived. At least he has not 
grown. And a thing that is not growing is in some 


stage of decay. Perhaps there is not a single subject 
126 


“I Do Not Ask to See the Distant Scene” 127 


of thought about which we think the Same as our 
fathers did fifty years ago. 

Growth is the law of everything that lives. Noth- 
ing that has not come up from simpler conditions— 
music, painting, architecture, art, science, trade, eco- 
nomics. Ours is a moving world and it is impossible 
to keep things stationary on a moving world. Noth- 
ing comes into life full grown. Everything develops. 
It is “first the blade, next the ear, then the full corn 
in the ear.”” Once we were offered evolution or Chris- 
tianity, but lo and behold, as somebody puts it, “we 
decided to take both.” As old Dr. McCosh used to 
say, “Evolution is nothing in the world but organized 
causation.” 

Now the idea of the Master in these words is that 
we are not capable of receiving all truth at once. We 
are not so built that it is possible. God’s chosen method 
is the method of search and discovery and graduation, 
challenging us to peg away at nature’s secrets and find 
things out for ourselves. Who cares for the things 
that cost him nothing? Where is the lad that prizes 
the inheritance his father left him, as much as 
if he had struggled for it and won it by his own un- 
aided efforts? Life is like a game of golf. The very 
thing that makes life so fascinating and so provoking, 
so provokingly fascinating, is the mingled success and 
failure that attend it. Besides, how otherwise could 
God act toward a developing, expanding creature, with 
infinite ambitions in his heart? Is there any other 
possible method of making a weak person strong, save 
by putting him up against a rough, tough task? How 


128 When the Morning Wakens 


can wisdom be gained except by the training of the 
mind in the search for what is hidden? This is the 
battle of the thinker. 

Every advance we make is born out of antagonism. 
Every energy we put forth may be expressed in terms 
of the opposition we confront. Every new ray of light 
we receive is only won by a fight against darkness. 
Otherwise it would not be our own. Nothing is our 
own till we have wrested it from resistance—not even 
our souls. “By your patience ye shall win your souls.” 
The way to truth leads into the valley before it scales 
the mountain. This is the reason why failure is often- 
times the biggest kind of success. 

Education is a slow process, and it is going to take 
eternity to complete it. The path of discovery is an 
endless one. There is always going to be something 
to find out, always something further on. When Edi- 
son was asked if we were not near the end of inven- 
tions, his reply was, “there is no end to inventions.” 
In a world such as ours, one never knows what one is 
going to meet just around the corner. What a splen- 
did epitaph that is on the stone of John Richard Green, 
the historian, “Hl died learning.” God reveals truth 
pretty much as He brings in the morn. The darkness 
is not scattered in a moment. The day does not come 
in a lightning flash. It comes leisurely. First a faint 
glimmering touches the hills, then a fading star in the 
paling west, then the flush of dawn, then gradually 
warmer colors are seen in the east, and then the great 
Orb Himself peeps above the horizon. Step by step 
the wonderful familiar miracle is wrought. 


“TI Do Not Ask to See the Distant Scene” 129 


And it is just so when things happen in the spiritual 
world. Revelation is not given in one great sudden 
outburst. The Master said there were things which the 
disciples could not understand at the time, but which 
would be made clear to them later on. There always 
have been those who could not stand the strain of new 
truth. It is quite possible indeed that a sudden un- 
veiling of truth for which we were not prepared might 
do harm, might blind us so that we could not see at all. 
- Every revelation must be adapted to the organ that 
receives it. We are not given fullness of light: we are 
saved by the gentleness that filters out the light. 

I: We know how true this is in the realm of educa- 
tion. A child starts with his A B C’s. BO Y boy, 
C A T cat; two and two are four; three and three are 
six. Then he is taught subtraction, division, the multi- 
plication table, then fractions, decimals, percentage. 
In a few years he is tackling Euclid, then he goes on 
to the calculus and the sines and cosines. Instruction 
is regulated according to capacity. No teacher starts 
his six-year-old pupil with the mysteries of quadratics. 
The child could not stand that test. You cannot pour 
the waters of the Amazon into the Bronx River. You 
do not give your little lad a razor or a revolver. You 
do not talk to him about psychology. You cannot 
hurry when you are teaching children. The period of 
development may be longer or shorter, but room must 
always be left for this element of time. Teaching, 
some one says, is like playing dominoes. If your op~ 
ponent puts down a four, you must match it with a 
four. 


130 When the Morning Wakens 


In his “Up from Slavery” Booker Washington tells 
of an old colored man during the days of slavery who 
wanted to learn how to play the guitar. In his desire to 
take lessons, he applied to one of his young masters to 
teach him. The young man replied, “All right Uncle 
Jake, I will give you some lessons but I am going to 
charge you for them. I will charge a dollar for the 
first lesson, fifty cents for the second and twenty-five 
for the third.” To which Uncle Jake replied, “All 
right boss, I’se agreed, only I wants yer to give 
me dat las lesson first.” So many of God’s children 
would like to learn the last lesson first. Horace Bush- 
nell in a letter to a friend tells a suggestive story: 
“When I was in college, I once undertook to read 
Coleridge’s ‘Aids to Reflection.’ But the author seemed 
foggy and unintelligible and I closed the book and laid 
it upon the shelf where it remained a long time. Mean- 
while my mind went on thinking and maturing, and one 
day, my eye falling on the book, I took it down and be- 
gan to read it, and behold all was lucid and delightful.” 

And in the school of later life the same law holds. 
We cannot explain these things to people, unless their 
minds are capable of taking them in. I doubt if Ein- 
stein could ever make clear to me the mysteries of rela- 
tivity. Why God does not reveal His will instantly is 
not the question. It is enough that he does not. His 
way is line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, 
there a little. He speaks “by divers portions and in 
divers manners.” Before Christ came the world knew 
only one way of treating evil and that was by reprisal. 
The Old Testament said “An eye for an eye, a tooth 


*T Do Not Ask to See the Distant Scene” 1381 


for a tooth.”’ If some one gives you a black eye, you 
give him a black eye back again. That was the Old 
Testament; but the New Testament says, If some 
one gives you a black eye, turn to him the other and 
tell him to discolor it too. He superseded the give-as- 
good-as-you-get rule by the divine law of forgiveness. 
The real morality of the Bible is its final morality. 
“This is my beloved Son, hear Him.” 

How often we hear the criticism made, why did 
not the Master tell us certain things? Why did He 
not enlarge more on the bodily resurrection or the 
nature of the future life? Why did He not explain 
more definitely His own second coming? Why did He 
not give some clear unmistakable statement on the 
Virgin Birth? Why did He not make perfectly dis- 
tinct what we are to understand by the inerrancy of the 
Scriptures? Why did He not tell us who wrote the 
Pentateuch? Well for one reason because many of 
these questions are not really fundamental. A funda- 
mental is something vital, something essential. But 
essential to what? To the integrity of Christian truth? 
To a system of dogmatic theology? Or to a victorious 
Christian life? The aim of all theology is holiness of 
life; “that the man of God may be perfect.” And 
when the question is put directly, who will be so bold 
as to claim that the question of who wrote the Penta- 
teuch, or a certain pre-millennial or post-millennial 
theory, is fundamental to holiness of life, 

Furthermore, the Master Himself said, and He said 
it very unequivocally, that many of these unveilings, 
such as the nature of the future life, could not be made 


132 When the Morning Wakens 


because their minds were not sufficiently prepared. “If 
I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how 
shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things.”’ Even 
had He told us what the house of many mansions was 
like, and how it was built, we would not be capable 
of receiving the announcement. So often we hear the 
remark made, ‘‘Why does not God give us what is best 
for us without our asking?” But a deeper question 
is, Can He? Can God give us the best things till we 
are ready for them? Can He give a prayerless man 
the blessings and comforts of prayer? I have heard 
men say, Why does not God forgive us all and make 
an end of it? But again the deeper question is, Can 
He do it? Can God forgive a man who does not want 
to be forgiven? God’s forgiveness is a self-communi- 
cation. To be forgiven is to be healed. It is a moral 
power of recovery imparted to the soul. And that im- 
plies co-operation and partnership. You may be yearn- 
ing to impart something to a friend but he may not 
be interested. While you are talking he may be nap- 
ping or star-gazing. When you finish he may say, 
What was it you were talking about? God cannot, any 
more than man, reach our hearts until we give Him 
our minds and wills. 

It must be confessed that with the Hebrew people 
spiritual development was slow. Sometimes indeed 
with us it is slow. Like some people their time of 
maturity seems to ripen late. Mirabeau was forty 
years old before he manifested any signs of his real 
power. The world never heard of Von Moltke until 
he was sixty-six, and he was almost seventy when he 


“I Do Not Ask to See the Distant Scene” 133 


proved himself a great soldier. Here is Stonewall 
Jackson. We know the kind of man he was because 
his name betrays it. Colonel Henderson in his biog- 
raphy tells us of the long years of preparation, but 
when the crisis came the strength to meet it was there. 
If some men are ahead of their time, others seem to 
be behind it. John Wycliffe in England was just as 
great and brave as Luther. But he failed, one historian 
writes, because he came a hundred years too soon. It 
is quite possible, is it not, that Woodrow Wilson came 
too soon? Luther came at the nick of time, when the 
world was ready for his message. God’s trains never 
keep us waiting. They are always on the dot. When 
the world needs a Lincoln, Lincoln arrives. Did not 
the Master say, “Mine hour is not yet come’? But? 
when it did come, He steadfastly set His face to go to 
Jerusalem. 

II: And that leads us to the next thought, viz.: how 
the same law is true of God’s education of the race. 
His revelation to the race is a gradual one. It is a 
stepping from limited to larger knowledge. God’s ways 
of working are sometimes slow but they are always 
sure. He waits His appointed time. One morning in 
1492 Columbus landed on an island in the West Indies. 
He did not know that he had discovered a great world. 
He was looking for a new road to India but he dis- 
covered a new continent. A few years later Ponce de 
Leon landed on the shores of Florida, but he only 
stayed a few days. John Cabot came out in 1497. 
Then Sir Francis Drake made another flying trip. 
Perhaps we ought not to call it a flying trip when we 


134 When the Morning Wakens 


remember that he took thirty-seven days to come out. 
In spite of several costly attempts, the 16th century 
closed with no English settlement on the shores of 
America. It seems passing strange that 128 years 
passed before a little company of men and women 
set sail to make this great rich land their home. Yes, 
we waited 128 years for the Mayflower. 

And all through the Bible we find this principle at 
work. ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only 
begotten Son.” But that Son did not appear until 
the fullness of time was ripe. And after He came He 
promised larger and richer developments. “Ye shall 
see greater things than these.” They were not ready 
yet for a full unveiling. “I have many things to say 
unto you but ye cannot bear them now.” “When the 
spirit of truth is come He will lead you into all the 
truth.”” The most foolish thing conceivable is to try to 
stop the advance of scholarship. Why should we be 
afraid of inquiry if our faith is true? No one can 
do anything against the truth. Christianity is not a 
never changing lake but a constantly changing river, 
ever gaining new tributaries, and widening and deepen- 
ing as it nears the sea. Paul speaks of the unsearchable 
riches of Christ. He means the deeper he went, the 
more wonders he saw. ‘Oh the depth of the riches 
both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.” 

A book to be found in almost every minister’s library 
is entitled a “History of Doctrine.” Doctrine has a 
history. It is a development. Does doctrine have a 
history? you say. Why, certainly. Take the doctrine 
of Immortality. How dimly it shines in the Old Tes- 


“I Do Not Ask to See the Distant Scene” 135 


tament. The glory of the New Testament is that it 
brings life and immortality to light. At Sinai God 
was revealed in a thunderstorm, on a lonely mountain, 
in the image of a man. At the sight the people did 
exceedingly fear and quake. But in the Gospels God 
is a spirit. Suppose Moses had spoken the truths of the 
Sermon on the Mount to the Israelites at the Red Sea. 
What would these marvelous beatitudes have meant to 
them? Almost nothing. They were not ready for 
such exalted ideals, They were children. They needed 
blocks and pictures and toys and dolls and symbols— 
an ark, an altar, a sacrifice, a pillar of cloud, a pillar 
of fire. | 
As when an ocean liner is sailing out of the harbor 
she must creep slowly to avoid collision, so when a 
new truth is launched there are many obstacles in its 
path and it must content itself with very tardy progress 
until it reaches the open sea. The morality of the 
Pentateuch is the morality of the primer. As the 
nation advanced more light was given. It is not fair 
to ask the morality of Isaiah from the people of Abra- 
ham’s day, nor the spirituality of Paul from the minor 
prophets. There is much in the earlier books of the 
Old Testament that conflicts with the Gospels. Per- 
fectly idiotic to deny that. When Jael is praised by 
the prophetess Deborah for the slaughter of Sisera— 
that is simply the imperfect standards of the time. It 
was a cruel treacherous thing to do, even to an enemy 
—to invite him into your tent and promise him safety, 
and then to put him to death while sleeping. From the 
Christian point of view the command to annihilate the 


136 When the Morning Wakens 


Canaanites is indefensible. Samson and Barak and 
Gideon are catalogued in the 11th of Hebrews among 
the heroes of faith, but they are a long, long shot from 
our conception of heroism. We cannot read the whole 
Bible from a New Testament point of view. We must 
not judge the journey by one mile. 

The only explanation of these things is the principle 
of accommodation. God permitted many things be- 
cause He was educating the race. He gave temporary 
approval of some things that in later revelations were 
condemned. Polygamy was part of the Mosaic law, as 
was slavery. Abraham had two wives, Hagar and 
Sarah. Jacob had two wives, Rachel and Leah. These 
things were tolerated on the principle of accommoda- 
tion. The aim being always to lift men up to a higher 
plane. What an injustice to judge Abraham by the 
20th century! The spirit of the New Testament con- 
demns both polygamy and slavery. The Mosaic ideal 
of marriage moves upward to the Christian ideal. 
Christianity never makes a crusade against slavery. 
It inculcates a spirit that makes slavery intolerable. 
Its overthrow was accomplished not by direct but by 
indirect attack. Slavery was doomed because it was 
seen to be incompatible with the mind of Christ. As 
Canon Mozley puts it: “The morality of a progressive 
dispensation is not the morality with which it starts 
but the morality with which it ends.” “Ye have heard 
that it hath been said by them of old time, but I say 
unto you.” 

Mr. Hi. G. Wells makes a motion to write a new 
Bible, and there are many who are ready to second 


“I Do Not Ask to See the Distant Scene” 137 


that motion. But we must be just to the good Book. 
We must not blame it for being something that it does 
not pretend to be. It nowhere claims to be a perfect 
revelation. It describes the stages of religious thought 
from crude ideas to the inerrant teachings of Jesus. 
One of our great Scottish writers, George MacDonald, 
puts these words into the mouth of one of his charac- 
ters: “Oh I wish I had never been made.” “Why 
my dear child,” replied her friend, “you are not made 
yet: you are only being made.’”’ That is a great truth. 
As Browning says, “The best is yet to be.” We are 
becoming. Some one says, “If I were God I would 
not reveal all the secrets of science in a moment, be- 
cause the best part of knowledge is the search for it: I 
would not unveil all the useful inventions at once, 
because no invention is any good until the race is ready 
for it.” Sir William Hamilton compared truth to a 
bird, and the method of getting it to a chase; to which 
Lessing added: “If the Almighty holding in one hand 
the bird, and in the other hand search for the bird, 
presented them both to me and asked me to choose, 
with all humility but without hesitation I should choose 
the latter.”” And Malebranche holding to the same fig- 
ure: “If I held truth captive in my hand, I would set 
it free for the pleasure of the pursuit.” 

The great lesson then to learn is this, that God can- 
not give any blessing to the world until the world is 
ready for it. He cannot give peace to the world until 
the world is ready for peace. He cannot give prohi- 
bition to the world until the world is ready for pro- 


138 When the Morning Wakens 


hibition. He cannot give self-government to the world 
until the world is ready for self-government. 

Otherwise, it is not a spiritual attainment; it is 
only a mechanical attachment. Good laws given to a 
people unprepared for them only do harm. Some one 
once said to Solon, “Have you given the people the 
best possible laws?”’ To which the great man replied, 
“T have given them the best laws of which they are 
capable.’ If you wish to give a man a bank note, 
you can give it to him at any time. You can give it 
personally; you can send it through a friend; you can 
put it in an envelope and forward it through the mail. 
But if you want to give that man a spiritual gift, 
you cannot do it until he is ready to receive it and 
make it his own. You cannot send it to him as a 
Christmas present. 

So let us pray that we may be ready for God’s gifts 
when they come to us. Pray not for larger mercies. 
Pray for larger minds and hearts. Pray not for more 
light. The light is sufficient. Pray for larger win- 
dows. Pray for a greater hospitality. Pray for a 
deeper understanding. Then the blessing will be yours. 


XI 


“Go Spread Your Trophies at His Feet” 


“Now Peter and John went up together 
into the temple at the hour of prayer.” 


Ve Kol Ae 


AND you remember what happened. A cripple was 
healed. It was the first recorded miracle of the Apos- 
tolic Church. That alone gives it distinction. The first 
trophy to lay at the feet of the Master! And it was 
there the Apostles laid it. 

The miracle made a profound impression on the 
people. It seems to have been a notorious case. The 
poor beggar was evidently a familiar sight at the gates 
of Zion. He was helpless. No doubt he had to be 
carried there every morning and carried back again 
every evening. And this had gone on for years. Every- 
body in Jerusalem knew the lame beggar at the Temple. 
They may not have known the High Priest as he passed 
in and out, but they all knew the cripple. The poor 
fellow was over forty years of age, and the thing had 
gone on for years. He had been there so long that 
he almost seemed a part of the institution. Doubtless 
his relatives were poor too: so they bore him daily to 

139 


140 When the Morning Wakens 


the same place and leaned him up against the wall 
and left him there for the day. He seemed to have a 
monopoly on the spot. 

Now there are some observations that it may be 
profitable to draw from this familiar story. And the 
first is this, that after the resurrection, the Apostles 
kept up the practice of public worship. Peter and 
John were going up to the afternoon service as usual. 
These two leading Apostles were much together in 
these early days. And it is worth noting that they 
maintained the old habit of going to church. They 
went to the temple with the common people at the hour 
of prayer. The wonderful gift of healing which was 
bestowed on them, had not lifted them above the duty 
of worshiping God like other less favored mortals. 

The church-going habit, it must be confessed, has 
fallen into sad disrepair of late years. The reasons 
given are many and most of them are thinly veiled. 
Perhaps they can be summed up in one big all-inclu- 
sive apology, that other things are considered of greater 
moment. Golf and motoring and baseball and football 
and fishing and hunting and autoing are more impor- 
tant. A friend was telling of entertaining a week-end 
party in her country home last spring. When Sunday 
morning came around she suggested that all go to 
church. One of the girls spoke up: ‘Such a beauti- 
ful morning! Oh it will be a terrible waste of time.” 
“Yes,” another voiced, ‘and such a waste of gray mat- 
ter.”’ 

One could wish that such an attitude was unusual, 
but is it unusual? And with many who would not be 


“Go Spread Your Trophies At His Feet” 141 


quite so frank, is it not a good deal how they feel? 
When we look out upon the world to-day we must con- 
fess that the outlook is not bright. There is an omi- 
nous drift from the call of public praise. And in the 
commercialism of the age, in which the sabbath day is 
suffering along with a lot of other things, the very 
purpose of church-going is being lost sight of. Many 
of us were brought up to feel that we had an appoint- 
ment with our Maker at 11 o’clock on Sunday morn- 
ings. Now men have other appointments that are 
more urgent. And the loss is great. There is an 
inspiration in the group that cannot be had in the 
individual. Every public speaker understands this. We 
call it atmosphere. It takes many petals to make the 
rose and they all must work together. The fireman 
knows that left to itself the lighted match goes out. 
It is only when the pieces of kindling are assembled 
that the flame passes from stick to stick. It is very 
doubtful if Christian civilization can propagate itself 
without the flesh and blood of a settled institution. 
Indeed, Christianity apart from the church has not 
been an appreciable factor in the betterment of man- 
kind. 

It is very doubtful too, if without church attendance 
the function of corporate religion can be long sus- 
tained. Bernard Shaw has a little brochure on “Going 
to Church.” He tells us that he is an unbeliever him- 
self but notwithstanding he goes to church. “The pur- 
pose of a cathedral,” he says, is “to point the way to 
the cathedral within me.” Gibbon was another unbe- 
liever who stuck up loyally for the church. His argu- 


142 When the Morning Wakens 


ment was that you could not build up a nation without 
religion. Walter Pater was still another. He was al- 
ways in his pew. These men felt that irreligion is all 
right for the individual but it doesn’t work for the 
state. Perhaps Bishop Gore did not overstate the 
matter when he said, “No sabbath means no church; 
no church means no worship; no worship means no 
religion; no religion means no morality; no morality 
means no society; no society means no government; no 
government means anarchy.” 

It is worth observing too that this poor paralytic 
was at the gate of the temple. He was not down in the 
market place among the traders. He was at the very 
gate of the temple. That is suggestive. Even to-day 
whoso enters a cathedral or chapel in any part of con- 
tinental Europe, is almost sure to be compelled to pass 
several mendicants at the door. It leads one to wonder 
if it is not true that it is the people who frequent the 
temple who are most thoughtful of the poor. The 
statistics on that score are convincing. It is religious 
people who are supporting very largely the eleemosy- 
nary institutions of the world. Religion and compas- 
sion have always gone hand in hand together. This 
poor man knew where to go for alms. He knew where 
people’s hearts were softest. He knew where trade 
was good. The man who loves God most is the man 
who will love his fellow men the most. There were 
three services daily in the synagogue, at nine in the 
morning, at noon, and then at three in the afternoon. 
These hours of prayer were to him his hours of busi- 
ness. 7 


“Go Spread Your Trophies At His Feet” 143 


Why is it that ministers of religion are so besieged 
with beggars? I recall one person. She came for 
financial assistance. We had never met before. “I 
come to your church occasionally,’ she began, “al- 
though I am frank to admit that I do not believe what 
you preach, but then I enjoy the service. I’m an agnos- 
tic, but I think you are sincere.” I thanked her for the 
compliment. JI was reminded of James Martineau 
who used frequently to go to Spurgeon’s tabernacle. 
A friend said to him: “Why do you go to hear 
that man so often? You do not believe what he says.” 
“No,” said Martineau, “but he does.” It is splendid 
when the world thinks that we are at least sincere. The 
criticism leveled against preachers to-day so often is 
that they are not sincere, and that many of them do 
not believe half of what they are saying. Every true 
minister is happy to be approached by the poor and 
the needy. It is the right thing to do. What are we 
here for? If men and women cannot come to us when 
there is need, to whom can they go? We profess to 
be the followers of Him whose great passion was to 
help people. And if we could only weed out the 
quacks and sharpers and swindlers who flock to us 
and waste our time and steal our sympathy and empty 
our scrips, the interviews would be more encouraging. 

It is not difficult to picture this cripple in his usual 
place sitting at the Beautiful Gate, an eyesore perhaps, 
a bundle of deformed humanity. The crowd is passing 
in and hardly anybody notices him. Perhaps a Phari- 
see in his broad phylactery bound around his forehead 
flings a piece of silver, and makes it ring ostentatiously _ 


_ 
~ 


es 





144 When the Morning Wakens 


on the marble pavement. How eagerly he reaches out 
for it! Perhaps a little lad runs back and slyly slips 
a coin into his hand, and then hastens to join his mother 
who had suggested the gift. Then he keeps looking 
back till he is lost in the crowd. 

But one day something wonderful happened. Two 
men with a strange light in their faces were passing by. 
They fastened their eyes on him, we are told. The ex- 
pression is an unusual one. They were on their way 
to worship but they fixed their gaze on him. It was a 
searching look as if some divine fire was flashing 
through their eyes. No doubt Peter and John often 
passed him before, and paid little attention to his sad 
plight. But to-day “fastening their eyes on him,” one 
of them said: “Look on us.” The man gave instant 
heed expecting, of course, a dole. He knows Peter is 
going to give him something—he thinks money—but 
how his heart must have sunk within when he heard 
the words: “Silver and gold have I none.” It was 
silver and gold he wanted. However, the last sentence 
stirred his hopes, “Silver and gold have I none but 
such as I have give I thee; in the name of Jesus Christ 
of Nazareth rise up and walk.” That surely was a bold 
command to make. How did Peter know that the man 
would so suddenly believe? What a daring mighty 
challenge is Faith! 

Then Peter took him by the hand and lifted him 
up, and immediately his feet and ankle bones received 
strength, and he walked inside the gates, leaping and 
praising God. For many years he had watched the 
crowd pass in: now he passed in himself. The man 


“Go Spread Your Trophies At His Feet’? 145 


rose up at Peter’s word, “In the name of Jesus Christ 
of Nazareth rise up and walk.” It was faith, faith in 
Peter, and simultaneously faith in Peter’s Christ. The 
man had his faith in Christ quickened and confirmed 
by the faith of Peter. -Peter’s faith and the man’s 
faith met, as it were. He believed that by the power 
of God he could get up, and so he got up and stood on 
his feet. Note how Peter himself explains it: “The 
name of Christ, through faith in His name hath made 
this man strong, yea the faith which is by Him hath 
given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you 
all.” Cannot you hear him singing “O magnify the 
Lord with me and let us exalt His name together’’? 
“This poor man cried and the Lord heard him and 
delivered him.’”’ And after the service was over, the 
people came down the steps and the crowd got bigger 
and bigger. And Peter was so moved by the Spirit 
that he started in to preach a sermon, taking the cripple 
for his text. 

Well, after all, that is the important thing, the ser- 
mon. And was it not a wonderful sermon? And the 
most wonderful thing about it is that Peter gives all 
the credit to the Lord. The Apostles take no glory to 
themselves at all. Indeed they seem surprised at the 
sensation produced. “Why marvel ye at this?” they 
say. This is not the work of man: this is the work 
of the Lord Jesus Christ whom ye slew and crucified. 
We are simply the channels of His power. God hath 
raised Him up. We are witnesses of that fact. That 
surely was a bold statement to make. “Ye denied the 
Holy One and asked for a murderer to be granted 


146 When the Morning Wakens 


unto you.” Remember Peter is talking to the men 
(some of them dignitaries) who railroaded the Master 
to the cross, and in the very city where He was hooted 
and scourged and crucified. If they could have gain- 
said the statement, why did they not do it? It was 
only six weeks since that the thing happened. The 
tragedy was fresh in their minds. Yet six weeks after 
it was done, these Apostles were proclaiming publicly 
to His enemies and accusers that He was risen from 
the dead. And the impression made was so great that 
5,000 were converted. 

Then does not the whole incident teach us too that 
the church is called to-day to a great, wide, far-reaching 
ministry of healing? Has not this part of our work 
been sorely neglected? Why is it that the miracles of 
our Lord are mostly miracles of cure? Too long the 
church has acted as if she felt that God is not greatly 
concerned with the physical ills of mankind. Contrari- 
wise, it is the will of God that sickness and suffering 
should not be. We are doing His will when we fight 
these things. Plague and pestilence and every manner 
of sickness and every stamp of disease are enemies 
to be overcome. Preventible disease ought to be pre- 
vented. The man who gives his life trying to find a 
cure for cancer, let us say, is as truly a martyr as 
William Tyndale or any canonized saint of the church. 
The story in the gospel of Luke of the poor woman 
who had been bound down with an infirmity for eight- 
een years will be recalled. Her neighbors had looked 
at her and said, ‘What a visitation of God.’ They 
told her no doubt to try and be resigned. But our 





“Go Spread Your Trophies At His Feet” 147 


Lord did not say that God had bound her. He said 
Satan had bound her these many years, but the Son 
of God could liberate her. And even if it was the sab- 
bath day He was going to loose her from her in- 
firmities. 

Pain is never the will of Providence. If faith will 
heal a sick man it is his duty to exercise faith. If 
suggestion will bring relief he should invoke the aid 
of every helpful suggestion. If going to a hospital for 
an operation promises recovery he should submit to 
that. There are many ways of healing to-day that the 
Apostles knew nothing of. We have powers that they 
did not have. They knew nothing of hospitals and 
antiseptics and nurses and surgeons of skill as we know 
these blessed allies now. Most sensible people believe 
in hospitals, but hospitals alone are not going to abol 
ish pain and suffering. Our medical schools may 
separate all the germs of all the ills but that is not 
going to abrogate disease. So long as sin rules in 
the heart of man, just so long will disease hold sway. 

And anyway suggestion of itself is of little value. 
Christian Science is helpless. Drugs can do nothing. 
Even surgery has no healing virtue. It can cut away 
obstructions, that is all. It is nature that does the 
healing, God in nature. ‘We dress the wound; God 
heals it.” Yes, even faith is impotent. We hear men 
speak of faith healing but faith has no power to heal. 
It is God who does the healing, not faith. The power 
is the power of God. Faith is only the instrument, 
but what a mighty blessed instrument when He wields 
it! 


148 When the Morning Wakens 


Recently Dr. Cabot was lecturing in Boston on psy- 
chotherapy. And when he had finished his lecture 
some one in the audience spoke up, ‘““What you say 
Doctor may be true of functional diseases, but do you 
believe that organic diseases, diseases like cancer for 
instance, can be cured in that way?” Dr. Cabot’s 
reply was: “I have never heard of a case of cancer 
being cured by faith, but I would like to say this, I 
have never yet found myself in the presence of any 
disease that baffled me, without thinking, Well now if 
I only had a hundred times the personality that I have, 
who would say what is and what is not possible.” 
Jesus was not a psychotherapist in the sense in which 
we use that word to-day. He was not a teacher of sug- 
gestion or autosuggestion. His power was the power 
of God passing through the personality of the individ- 
ual. The thing we have to reckon with is the person- 
ality of Jesus Christ and the effect of that personality 
upon the bodies as well as the souls of men. 

And then one thought more. Let us not suppose 
that because we have no money we can do nothing to 
help the impotent men and women who are round 
about us. We may not have the silver of eloquence or 
the gold of human learning. We may have precious 
little of this world’s goods. But we may have stores of 
spiritual life and love and we may go around lifting 
men up into a life of joy and praise. The best treasure 
is the treasure communicated from the heart. I can 
help some lame man. I can read to some blind man. 
To impart strength and hope and courage is after all 
the great thing. Oftentimes the help needed most is not 


“Go Spread Your Trophies At His Feet” 149 


material help, but the help that comes from inward re- 
sources. The men who have made the world rich have 
not always been the rich men. What did Peter have? 
He had a grip on Jesus Christ. He had the power to 
inspire confidence. He had the love of God in his 
soul. Silver and gold can do much but they cannot do 
all. They can build libraries but they cannot write 
books to fill the shelves. When we call in the doctor, 
we do not care how much silver and gold he has or 
whether he has any. The negative list is beside the 
mark. What we do insist on his having is a well- 
equipped mind, a skillful hand and a warm heart. It 
is not what we do not know. It is what we do know. 
“Our knowledge however small, is mightier than our 
ignorance however great.” Take what you have and 
hand it over to the Master for His blessing. Nothing 
but He can use it! We are to dedicate every skill of 
hand and gift of mind for service. Religion does not 
clip any legitimate wing. All things are ours be- 
cause we are His. Can you sing? Sing for His 
glory. Can you paint? Paint to His praise. There 
is no talent that has not its place in the Christian life. 
The Christian life is a life of helping others and that 
can be done in galaxies of ways. Have you a strong 
imagination and have you used it in ways of evil? 
Why not baptize it unto His name? It can make the 
dustiest road beautiful. Have you been a profane 
man? Have you been eloquent in cursing your Maker? 
Why not dedicate henceforth your lips to His worship. 
Anatole France in one of his stories has an acrobat 
perform his stunts before the altar. He was doing it 


150 When the Morning Wakens 


as a religious act. He felt it was the only talent he 
had and he was using it with all the skill he possessed. 
And it was accepted too. General Booth used to say 
that whenever he heard a popular song in the music 
halls he liked to put it to religious words and use it 
in his Army meetings. He felt that the Devil had no 
right to all the fine strains. He captured it for the 
King. Let us do likewise. 


“Go spread your trophies at His feet 
And crown Him Lord of all.” 


XII 


“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot, Upward I Fly” 


“Lift up your eyes on high and behold 
who hath created these things that bringeth 
out their host by number.” 


Isaiah 40:26 


SoME one has remarked that reading this 4oth chap- 
ter of Isaiah is like walking over mountains that lie 
a mile apart. One needs the step and the stride of a 
giant. These old prophets knew quite a little about 
the heavenly constellations and their movements. No- 
body knows who the first astronomer was, or when he 
lived, or what his name was, but we do know that the 
stars bewildered these holy men of old, fascinated 
them, inspired them. Job in his great poem speaks of 
the bands of Orion. He speaks of Arcturus and 
Alcyone and the Hyades and Mazzoreth in his season. 
The apparent motions of the moon were well known 
to the Israelites because the Hebrew year was lunar. 
The Bible is not a text book on astronomy; it no- 
where pretends to be. Astronomy was never developed 
among the ancient Israelites into a real science. All 
the same, there is much in it that is trustworthy. 

When we lift up our eyes and behold the heavenly 

151 


152 When the Morning Wakens 


bodies, the first thing that strikes us is their number. 
They are indeed a host. “That bringeth out their host 
by number.” And if Isaiah could use the word host, 
what word are we going to use? There were no 
glasses in those days and only about 6,000 luminaries 
can be detected without a glass. But in Galileo’s time 
they discovered the concave lens and he computed the 
number at 30,000. A hundred years later, Sir William 
Herschel came along with a larger lens and he counted 
more than twenty million. Then came photography 
and the camera laid bare about 100 million. And 
to-day astronomers tell us it 1s quite impossible to com- 
pute the number of the starry wonders. We can only 
count seven in the Pleiades, but when we use the 
sensitive plate, we know there are 3,000 in that one 
constellation alone. 

Then when we leave the solar system and look out 
into the sidereal, we are calmly told that the nearest 
of those stars is twenty-five billions of miles away; 
billions note, not millions. I fear we are apt to forget 
what a billion is. We are becoming so familiar with 
the word in economics that it has lost much of its be- 
wildering magnitude. The way one astronomer puts 
it is this: “If you were in Sirius and wanted to see 
our sun, it would be like looking at a half penny 1600 
miles away.” One would require a mighty glass to 
see a half penny as far off as Omaha. Space has 
very little meaning for us to-day. Astronomy has well- 
nigh annihilated the word. The vastness is too incon- 
ceivable. The mind cannot grasp the solar system 
much less the sidereal. It staggers the imagination. 


“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot” 158 


The whole mystery is too appalling—the incompre- 
hensible reaches, the impenetrable stretches. Unless 
there is some Mighty Heart back of it all to love and 
trust, the situation is truly desperate. Man has dis- 
covered a universe that his little mind cannot contain. 
It is too big for him. He is crushed by his own dis- 
coveries. 

In his poem, ‘The Torch-Bearers,” Alfred Noyes 
tells of the completion of the great 100-inch telescope 
on Mt. Wilson, California. It is the largest reflector 
in the world. Mr. Noyes was invited to spend the 
night on the top of the mountain when the giant glass 
was first unveiled. It was expected that the photo- 
graphs would unveil millions of worlds never before 
seen by mortal eye. He tells how Professor Hale 
mounted the ladder and looked through the great tube. 
It was the first test they made! 


“To-morrow night’”—so wrote the chief, “we try 
Our great new telescope the 100 inch. 
Your Milton’s optic tube has grown in power 
Since Galileo, famous blind and old, 
Talked with him in that prison of the sky. 
We creep to power by inches. Even to-night 
Our own old 60 has its work to do; 
And now our 100 inch. I hardly dare 
To think what this new muzzle of ours may find. 
Come up, and spend the night among the stars 
Here on our mountain top.” 


But we are not thinking particularly just now of the 
starry heavens. There are other heights in life— 





154 When the Morning Wakens 


heights to us perhaps that are even more momentous. 
Hasn’t everybody some sort of mountain in his life? 
It is difficult to conceive of a life where the outlook 
is one dead level flat. Even those lives that seem 
most monotonous—even these have oftentimes great 
spiritual summits could we but only see them. These 
are the peaks to which the soul looks up in eager long- 
ing and in earnest quest. 

I. Take for instance our work. We are so hurried 
and jostled in the battle of life that half the time we 
lose sight of its purpose. So much of our time and 
strength are occupied with making a living that we 
forget all about making a life. We have become more 
interested in machinery than in men. When we con- 
sider the industrial world we see automobiles, ships, 
railroads, shops, banks, telephones, forges, factories 
and all our mechanical devices. The purpose of it all 
is to produce and add to the world’s wealth. But is 
there no goal higher than this? Are these the loftiest 
peaks? Has industry no spiritual meaning? Is the 
machine meant for man, or is man meant for the 
machine? This, after all, is the great test question. 
The simple truth is that everything we do has two 
sides—a side toward heaven and a side toward earth. 
There is not a task we undertake, that may not elevate 
or debase us, according to the spirit in which we 
meet it. Everything has its spiritual aspect. We are 
always emphasizing our work, but the great thing is not 
our work but the kind of men our work is making 
of us. It is not the house the carpenter builds that is 
the important thing; it is what the carpenter himself 





“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot” 155 


becomes while he is building it. We are constantly 
turning things upside down; we put secondary things 
on top. Max Beerbohm has an essay in which he 
claims that many people to-day seem to think that criti- 
cizing a thing calls for greater gifts than creating it. 
He pictures for us the literary scribbler sitting at his 
desk and berating the author who has created the classic 
he is rash enough to disparagingly review. 

We look around and we see men who have no 
upward glance. Their eyes are on the pavement. They 
see only the dust, the dirt, the oil, the grease. They 
view the material part of the business and the mechan- 
ism. It is all noise and clash and confusion. They do 
not see the real meaning of shops and banks and facto- 
ries. A well-known divine tells us of the service in 
his church last Easter, when everybody was so up- 
lifted and thrilled after listening to the Hallelujah 
Chorus that they seemed to be in heavenly places. A 
lady turned to one of his members sitting in the same 
pew and said to her: “Would you mind telling me 
where you got your hat?” Who does not feel for such 
people? One would like to say to them, “Lift up your 
eyes and behold.” Take a look at the hills and the 
stars. The great things of life are not below, they 
are above. The enduring product is not steel but 
soul. In plants there is an instinct prompting them to 
rise from underground darkness up into the realms of 
light and joy. This passion for the sky is the symbol 
of the Christian life. The soul demands the sky. No 
true life is possible on low levels. There is a story 
of a man who captured an eagle and tethered it at his 


156 When the Morning Wakens 


kitchen door, making it eat its meals out of a tin plate. 
It is typical of the multitudes we see, who were meant 
for celestial flights but who live in the soul’s back- 
yard. 

The American people are supposed to be a highly 
civilized people, but it is extremely questionable if we 
are a people of real culture. Because the two are not 
always found together. Civilization represents the ex- 
ternal values—property, government, commerce, trade. 
Culture, on the other hand, includes the inner assets,— 
truth, beauty, art, philosophy, faith, religion. Civiliza- 
tion dwells in a world of material things: culture be- 
longs to the spirit. It is a case of the outer versus 
the inner. Business is driving men so terrifically hard 
these days. There never was a time when people were 
living so much before the footlights. A great orches- 
tral leader says we are living under the dominion of 
din. An eminent visitor from the other side tells an 
experience that happened to him some years ago in 
this city of ours. He was down visiting the lower 
part of Manhattan, the banks, the stock exchange, and 
the financial houses where men sweat and scheme for 
the gold and silver. One day as he was walking up 
Wall Street, he lifted his eye to the spire of Trinity, 
and the old bells were pealing out a familiar hymn. 
He could barely hear it with the racket. But listening 
intently he caught the tune, “Hark, hark my soul, an- 
gelic songs are swelling.” “Far, far away like bells 
at evening pealing.”’ Why, he adds, it was a moment 
with a thrill to it. “It sort of pinned me to the pave- 
ment.’ There in that spot where the money world 


“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot”’ 157 


had its very throne, there fell on my ears a song that 
spoke of Heaven. “I was hearing the Lord’s song 
in a strange land.” 

II. And the same is true of our pleasures. Some 
one has said that of the 110 million people in our coun- 
try 109 million are living for pleasure. Perhaps that 
is an exaggerated estimate, but certainly the army is a 
vast one. Here in New York especially is the throne 
of Vanity Fair. For some strange reason we have 
come to feel to-day that pleasure is everything. There 
is undoubtedly an excessive evaluation of it. It is 
prized more than anything else. Pleasure is the great 
thing. And the real danger is that if one gets into 
the current, it is likely to sweep him farther than he 
meant to go. It is very apt to carry him too far. The 
first commandment in the modern decalogue seems to 
be: “Thou shalt enjoy thyself.” 

There is a remarkable picture by George Frederick 
Watts entitled, “The Pursuit of Pleasure.” It is a 
long trail leading to a precipice and at the foot of the 
precipice there is the dim glimpse of a graveyard. The 
trail is packed with men and women pushing and 
jostling one another, everybody struggling to be the 
first to reach the figure of Pleasure, as she stands beck- 
oning just above the brink. And if you look closely 
you will note that there is not one single face looking 
up. Everybody’s eye is glued to the ground. One 
is oppressed with the tautness, the strained attitude, 
the breathless expressions. It is the world’s pursuit of 
Pleasure. The world is feverishly chasing the pomps 
and splendors and voluptuous delights that fascinate 


158 When the Morning Wakens 


and enslave men’s hearts. See that boy with his head 
buried deep in a paper. It is a betting paper. His 
eye is scanning the races. How one would like to say 
to that young lad: “Young man, lift up your eyes.” Get 
up on higher ground. “Get thee up into a mountain.” 
Wonderful how far one can see from a mountain! 
There is a peak in the Adirondacks from which can 
be seen the spires of Montreal. The sacred mountain 
Fujiyama dominates the ocean for one hundred miles 
as you enter the city of Yokohama. Get thee up into 
a mountain. Look at this matter of pleasure from a 
lofty height. In one of the old Greek stories we read 
that those who once heard Apollo sing, never wanted 
to hear their own voices again. Only give the soul a 
taste of the highest and it soon tires of all that falls 
below. There is no discontent with the low orders of 
life because they have never had anything to awaken 
desire. Every life should have its mountain of Trans- 
figuration. There is no view in the valley. Get up 
into the clearer air, above the dust and smoke and dirt 
of life’s rude struggle. Believe in the higher pleasures 
and the possibilities of bliss they hold out to us. He 
who would hit the bull’s eye of true happiness must 
aim above it. Mountaineers tell us about the snake 
line. Snakes are not mountain climbers. They are 
rarely found more than 1200 feet above sea level. Get 
up above the snake line. Those who live on the moun- 
tain tops are in no danger from the venomous rattler. 
Keep down in the lowlands and you are apt to be bitten. 
Like the battle of Lookout Mountain, the great victories 
of life are usually fought above the clouds. If you 


“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot” 159 


go up far enough in an airplane the bullet cannot 
reach you, or if it does, by the time it arrives the 
thing is out of breath. ‘We should fight our tempta- 
tions on radiant heights. Fight them under God’s own 
eye: Fight them in Beulah land, within sight of the 
Holy City.” 

It is interesting to note how all God’s appointments 
were on the mountain top. To Moses He said, “Meet 
me early on the mountain.”” When Abraham was told 
to sacrifice his son it was to a mountain he was sum- 
moned. There is hardly an appointment in all Scrip- 
ture that does not convene on a mountain. There’s 
Sinai, Nebo, Gerizim, Olivet, Calvary. Lift up your 
eyes. Lift up your heart. Sursum corda. Get away 
from the narrow limits that shut you in. If you climb 
the zenith, heaven and earth are on your side. The 
stars will fight with you; the strong mountains will 
stand around you; the great deep will call to you. “I 
will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence com- 
eth my help.” “My help cometh from the Lord who 
made heaven and earth,” 


“Ah, once more,” I cried, “ye stars, ye waters, 
On my heart your mighty charm renew; 
Still let me, as I gaze upon you, 
Feel my soul becoming vast like you.” 


And then and best of all, there’s the joy and the peace 
of living up there. Whymper, the Alpine climber, used 
to say of one of his guides that he was only happy 
when 10,000 feet in air. The mountains are the first 


160 When the Morning Wakens 


to catch the morning ray. Jesus Christ never leads 
His children into the catacombs, They are cold, damp, 
chilly places. He takes us up and makes us sit together 
in heavenly altitudes with Himself. There was a story 
going the rounds last winter of a woman who was 
passing through New York. She came into the Grand 
Central by the New Haven. She took the shuttle to 
Times Square. There she floundered round a while 
and took the subway by mistake to the Battery. Then 
she came back underground to the Pennsylvania sta- 
tion and went out through the tunnel to Manhattan 
Junction. When she was asked for her impressions 
she answered that she had had a fine worm’s eye view 
of the city. Well, there are many who have a fine 
worm’s eye view of human life. But who would not 
rather have a bird’s eye view of it? One can imagine 
a cow browsing in the field contentedly and saying to 
herself: What care I for beauty or for botany? The 
clover is sweet; I don’t want it explained. That is the 
vision of the poor cow. But man is a different creature. 
No one has ever put it better than Augustine: “Thou 
hast made us for Thyself and no one is ever at rest 
until they rest in Thee.” 


“T cried, ‘Dear Angel, lead me to the 
heights 
And spur me to the top.’ 
The angel answered, ‘Stop 
And set thy house in order, make it 
fair 


“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot” 161 


For absent ones who may be speed- 
ing there; 
Then we will talk of heights.’ 


“T put my house in order, ‘Now 
lead on.’ 
The angel said, ‘Not yet; 
Thy garden is beset 
With thorns and tares: go weed it, 
so all those 
Who come to gaze may find the 
beauteous rose, 
Then we will journey on.’ 


“IT weeded well my garden, ‘All is 
done.’ 
The angel shook his head. 
‘A beggar stands,’ he said. 
‘Outside thy gates: till thou hast 
given heed 
And soothed his sorrows and sup- 
plied his need 
Say not that all is done.’ 


“The beggar left me singing. ‘Now 
at last, 

At last the path is clear.’ 

‘Nay, there is one draws near 

Who seeks like thee the difficult 
highway ; 


162 When the Morning Wakens 


He lacks thy courage, cheer him 
thou this day, 
Then we will cry “at last.’ ’ 


“T helped my weaker brother. ‘Now 
the heights! 

Oh guide me, angel, guide.’ 

The presence at my side 

With radiant face said, ‘Look, 
where are we now?’ 

And lo! we stood upon the moun- 
tain’s brow— 

The heights, the shining heights.” 


And John Oxenham has a little poem with the same 
lesson. 


“To every man there openeth 

A way and ways and a way. 

And the high soul clmbs the high 

way, 

And the low soul gropes the low; 
And in between on the misty flats 
The rest drift to and fro. 

But to every man there openeth 
A high way and a low, 

And every man decideth 

The way his soul shall go.” 


“The easy path of the lowland 
Hath little of grand or new, 


“Sun, Moon and Stars Forgot” 163 


But the toilsome ascent leads on 

To a grand and glorious view. 

Peopled and warm the valley, 

Lonely and chill the height, 

But the path that is nearest the 
storm-cloud 

Is nearest the stars of light.” 


XITT 


‘Outside the Fast-Closed Door” 


“Be given to hospitality.” 
| Romans 12:13. 


Wuat a wonderful chapter this 13th of Romans is! 
After the keenest and profoundest doctrinal discus- 
sion we have the most practical advice. Like the 
pilot who has steered his ship safely past the rocks 
and through the rapids, he is now in quieter waters. 
Like the aviator who has been performing brilliant 
stunts above the clouds he has now landed. First 
we have the great fundamental truth of justifica- 
tion by faith analyzed and systematized with match- 
less and consummate skill, after which the Apostle 
comes down to earth, to the simple, everyday doings 
and virtues of the Christian and his relation to his 
fellow men. “Let love be without dissimulation,” he 
says, “abhor that which is evil, cleave to that which is 
good; be kindly affectioned one to another with broth- 
erly love, in honor preferring one another, not slothful 
in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoic- 
ing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing instant in 
prayer; distributing to the necessities of saints, given 
to hospitality.” 

164 


“Outside the Fast-Closed Door” 165 


It is of this last phrase I wish to speak for a moment: 
“Given to hospitality.’ And the original is even 
stronger, literally pursuing hospitality. We say of a 
man “he’s given to drink,” or “he’s given to dope,’ 
or “he’s given to lust,” or “he’s given to profanity.” 
We mean that the man is the slave of these things. 
He’s addicted to them. The word addicted is usually 
used in a sinister sense: addicted to vice, we say. Its 
commendable equivalent I suppose would be our word 
devoted. A man is devoted to science or to music or 
to art. And the Apostle calls us to this gracious and 
generous ideal, “Be devoted to hospitality.” 

The word hospitality is a simple word. It means 
just plain simple kindness, especially kindness to the 
stranger. It is derived from the Latin root hospes, 
a stranger. We say of a person, “he’s a hospitable 
fellow,’ meaning he is affable, courteous, consider- 
ate. It is the same root as our word host or hostage 
or hospital. <A hospital literally is a place where kind- 
ness is shown; that is the radical meaning of the word. 
The good Samaritan was a hospitable neighbor. In 
the Alps the mountain climber finds, at different stages 
of his journey, the hospice. They are warm, cheery, 
comfortable resting places for the tired pilgrim of the 
heights. 

We might apply the words to the church. Every 
church should be preéminently a hospitable place. 
Some one has called the Church of God a “league of 
pity.” I thing it was George Matheson. Certainly a 
most suggestive and splendid phrase! Think of the 
sick and the tired and the friendless. Think of the 


166 When the Morning Wakens 


homeless in this great homeless city. Think of the 
bruised and bleeding hearts needing the soft and tender 
touch. “A league of pity!’ Has it ever occurred to 
you how much greater consideration we show to our 
guests under our own roof, than we do oftentimes to 
these same people in the house of prayer? Some one 
comes to visit you. You are pleased to see them. You 
offer them the best seat ; you invite them to break bread 
with you. You give them the warmest kind of a wel- 
come. But how often we leave our courtesy at home 
when we enter the gates of Zion. I have always felt 
that about the only kind word that can be spoken for 
rented pews in a church is that it gives a chance to 
show Christian hospitality. “I need only two sittings,” 
a member said to me, “but I rent six so that I can invite 
strangers.” There are many who are telling us that 
coldness in the sanctuary has done more harm to the 
progress of the kingdom than any other one thing. I 
am not nearly as much afraid myself of heresy as I 
am of inhospitality. Because I feel that the latter has 
done infinitely more harm. We have lost the working 
man largely on this account. Rightly or wrongly he 
feels he is not wanted. The spirit of Christ and the 
spirit of caste have nothing whatever in common. 

It ought not to be possible to attend any church 
that calls itself a Christian church without being con- 
scious of some indescribable, intangible drawing to- 
ward every worshiper present. There ought to be an 
atmosphere in the place that is unmistakable, some- 
thing searching and pervading and stimulating, The 
most noticeable thing about any place of worship 


“Outside the Fast-Closed Door” 167 


ought to be, Behold how these people love one another. 
“How amiable are Thy tabernacles!” “How sweet 
and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in 
unity.” No worshiper should throw himself down 
in his pew on Sunday morning as if he owned the pew 
and the building and the preacher and the choir and 
the whole pious establishment. A church is not a Pull- 
man car nor an opera house nor a box office. It is our 
Father’s house and we are all His beloved and wel- 
come children. We are all members of one great 
catholic family. The greatest calamity that can happen 
to any congregation is to lose the passion for brother- 
hood, to become a religious coterie with cold and formal 
traditions. Because that kind of thing chills and freezes 
all spirituality. It should be our aim to break up every 
such deadly conspiracy of ice. Andrew brought Peter 
to Jesus and the poorest church in our city is the church 
that has no Andrews. If we live for ourselves, our 
life will be a brief one, and it will be an unhappy one. 
There will be nothing but leaves. We sit around the 
Lord’s Table. What does that mean? It means fel- 
lowship; it means communion; it means harmony; it 
means equality; it means unity; it means love. It 
means that here we are all on the level. As “One 
Increasing Purpose’ puts it, it means the Kingdom 
of Heaven spirit. “We are all one in Christ Jesus our 
Lord.” 

Or look at the words from another angle. Consider 
them from the angle of receptivity. Because there are 
many kinds of hospitality. There is such a thing as 
hospitality to truth and we should be sincerely and 


168 When the Morning Wakens 


passionately devoted to that. Our lot has been cast in 
the glare of these modern days, and we have felt the 
quickening thought of the age. The church must be 
true. She must be governed by the spirit of truth. 
She must love truth above all things else. I am anxious 
to emphasize this because there are scores of people in 
our churches to-day that seem to be afraid of the truth. 
Some are hide-bound in mind. They are impervious 
to new ideas. The clammy grip of the dead past is 
upon them. They cleave to antiquated forms, anti- 
quated confessions, antiquated valuations. 

Is it not a most humiliating thing, for instance, to 
listen to some ill-informed preacher when he belittles 
modern learning? I have heard them do it, and it 
makes one very uncomfortable. I have heard them 
pour ridicule on the researches of science. I have 
heard them raise a titter when the word evolution was 
mentioned. Time and again such narrowness has 
driven earnest thoughtful young men away. A great 
scholar said only the other day: “Why, sir, it is ortho- 
doxy that is killing the church,“ and by orthodoxy he 
did not mean soundness of faith but unwillingness to 
inspect new visions. Instance Joseph Priestley, a great 
clergyman and a great chemist. He was driven out 
here to the wilds of America because of his love for 
and loyalty to what he believed to be the truth. To-day 
there is a statue to his memory in Birmingham, the 
very town where he was mobbed, and on the very spot 
where his house was pulled down; and within a stone’s 
throw of that statue there is a great university teach- 


“Outside the Fast-Closed Door” 169 


ing the very things that he stood for one hundred and 
fifty years ago. 

We cannot fetter the modern spirit of inquiry. We 
must not try. We cannot stem it any more than we 
can stem the tides. All truth is God’s truth. Nature 
is one of God’s bibles, in which He makes known His 
will. Whoever is afraid of truth does not believe in 
God. If we love our opinions more than we love the 
truth then woe to us. We will harm no one so much 
as ourselves. Paul warns us against science falsely 
so called, but the science he refers to is not science as 
we know it to-day. The science of Paul’s day was 
nothing but a jargon of mystical and superstitious 
philosophy. If Paul were living to-day he would be 
the very best friend of true science. The God of 
nature and the God of revelation are one God. _I like 
the way that Beecher once put it. When Henry Ward 
Beecher was asked if he was a Calvinist, he replied that 
he was, in the sense of holding and teaching the doc- 
trines that Calvin would have taught if he had lived 
in our day. We often hear quoted the words of John 
Robinson. They were addressed to the Pilgrim Fathers 
260 years ago in the Mayflower: “The Lord has yet 
more light to break forth from His holy Word.” And 
then he went on to speak of the Calvinists and these 
were his words: “They stick where Calvin left them, 
a mistake much to be deplored, for though Calvin 
and Luther were shining lights, yet God had not re- 
vealed His whole will to them, and were they now 
living, they would be as ready to embrace further 
light as what they had received.’”’ The warning is 


170 When the Morning Wakens 


needed still. We must be willing to welcome every new 
truth of scholarship and make room for it in our cate- 
gories. Tradition is a priceless blessing to inherit but 
its true place is behind us, not before. Tradition is all 
right but if science contradicts tradition, then good-by 
tradition. Criticism has given us a new order and 
we might just as well step into line. Because it is 
perfect madness to fight the spirit of honest investiga- 
tion and reverent research. 

So let us be careful lest we be found fighting against 
truth. He who fights against truth fights against God. 
If a thing is false it will soon be swept aside; you 
simply cannot keep it alive, but if it is true you cannot 
stifle it or throttle it. Paul says the things that cannot 
be shaken will remain. “Truth crushed to earth will 
rise again.”” Giordano Bruno was burned as an infidel 
in Ragmarket Square in Rome three hundred years ago, 
but the real infidels were the priests who burned the 
body of a great thinker, a man who was willing to 
die for his belief. To-day pilgrims from all over the 
world seek his statue on the spot where his ashes fell. 
Bruno did not believe in the doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion and he was willing to go to the stake for his con- 
victions. If history proves anything, it proves this, that 
some so-called heretics are really the prophets of the 
living God. 

When a lad, I was told to accept what the Bible 
taught. Then when I inquired “What does the Bible 
teach?” a catechism was put into my hand with mar- 
velous questions and super-marvelous answers. It told 
me what the Bible taught. Who framed these ques- 


“Outside the Fast-Closed Door’ 171 


tions and answers? Fallible men. But might not they 
be mistaken? Might not their judgment be sometimes 
at fault? They certainly were not inspired. They 
were great men, good men, but they were not infallible 
men. Look at the great Presbyterian Church to-day. 
She is on the verge of a volcano simply because 
there is a group of short-sighted, narrow-minded men 
in her fold to whom every new truth is unwelcome. 
Dr. Fosdick loves the Bible. He loves it as the very 
word of God. His quarrel is not with the Bible but 
with the interpretation of the Bible. He believes that 
many of the dogmas taught by the church are unscrip- 
tural. He does not believe, for instance, the doctrine 
of the Virgin Birth, Many of us still continue to 
accept this great historic article. We believe that Jesus 
Christ was a miracle. We believe His resurrection was 
a miracle. We believe His life was a miracle. We 
believe His birth was a miracle. But then some of the 
saintliest scholars and humblest disciples and sweetest 
Christians in the world to-day take the stand that he 
does. And who are we to read such noble men out of 
the fold? It is almost a hundred years ago, in the year 
1828 to be exact, that the school board of Lancashire, 
Ohio, passed this resolution in answer to a request for 
the use of the schoolhouse for a debate on the prac- 
ticability of railroads: 


“You are welcome to use the schoolroom to debate 
all proper questions in, but such things as railroads 
and telegraphs are impossibilities and rank infidelity. 
There is nothing in the Word of God about them. If 


172 When the Morning Wakens 


God had designed that His intelligent creatures should 
travel at the frightful speed of fifteen miles an hour 
by steam, He would have foretold it through His holy 
prophets. It is a device of Satan to lead immortal 
souls astray.”’ 


How perfectly childish to keep on fighting the spirit 
of modernism! We see it in nations; China, for 
instance! China is an illustration of a great nation, 
that has built up a great wall around her boundaries, 
hoping in this way to shut out every invasion of new 
light. Japan, on the other hand, has shown herself 
ready to welcome every promising arrival. She has 
sent her young men to the four corners of the earth 
to survey and study and bring back every civilizing 
influence that is likely to make her people and her nation 
great. Let us not deceive ourselves. The question of 
intellectual hospitality is a far-reaching matter. It is 
far-reaching because there is a suspicion abroad that 
preachers are not always frank and open with their 
people, that they have an exoteric doctrine for their 
public utterances and an esoteric confession privately 
for their friends; that they are echoes, not voices; that 
they have lost the old prophetic accent; that they are 
bound, most of them, in an ironclad armor of the six- 
teenth century which leaves no room to grow. ‘“Min- 
isters do not believe one-half they preach,” said a glib 
young critic the other day. That is a startling indict- 
ment. If it be true, we are of all men most pitiable. 
So let us, I insist, be open-minded. Let us not be 
afraid. Let us not tremble for the ark of God. Let 


“Outside the F'ast-Closed Door” 173 


us not be forever turning a deaf ear to every new 
voice. Let us remember the words of Gamaliel: “If 
this counsel be of men it will come to naught, but if 
it be of God ye cannot overthrow it.” Henry Eighth 
called himself “‘Fidei Defensor,’ Defender of the Faith. 
And many a better man than Henry has stood up, as 
he believed, to defend the faith or the truth. But truth 
needs no defense. Truth can stand alone. Truth is 
well able to take care of herself. Defending the truth 
is like a warrior defending his shield. The truth is to 
defend us, not we it. When Whittier was a young 
man no hymns were allowed in the old Quaker meeting 
house where he sat. But at his funeral some of his 
own sweet lyrics were sung. His body was borne ten- 
derly out into the garden because the house was too 
small to accommodate the mourners. The old objec- 
tion to hymns and music was forgotten; the hard 
wooden benches were left behind as the sorrowing 
people all filed out into God’s fresh air, and sang the 
songs of Zion under the elm trees. 

And that leads us to one more angle of observation; 
Hospitality to our Lord! Giving Him absolute right 
of way in our lives, Full surrender. The most hos- 
pitable being is God. He seeks to come into the life 
of every child. He stands at the door seeking admit- 
tance. He will not force the lock. He knocks and 
waits. He’s been waiting a long time for some of 
us. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any 
man open the door I will come in and sup with him 
and he with Me.” He will not come in until we are 
willing for every evil thing to depart. He asks not a 


174 When the Morning Wakens 


niggardly but an abundant entrance. ‘“‘For so an 
entrance shall be ministered unto you into the ever- 
lasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”’ 


Lift up the windows of light, my brother! 
Lift high and wide; 

The balmy morning is bracing, tonical 
Orient-eyed ; 
And a glad tide 

Of song flows from full-voiced tree tops 
Hard beside. 


Swing back the shutters of life, my sister! 
Swing them afar; 

The blush of dawn is painting the pansy, 
Paling the star 
While fingers are 

Streaking the eastern heavens with 
Bolt and bar. 


Open the door of your heart then, sinner! 
Make Him your guest; 

The darkness He’ll scatter, the doubt 

remove, 

The sin arrest; 
Sunshine and zest 

He'll be at morn, at nightfall peace and 
Last the best. 


XIV 


“Thy Touch Has Still Its Ancient Power” 


“Lord if thou wilt thou canst make me 
clean.” 


Luke 5:12. 


THE story is told by all the Synoptists. And there 
are variations in the way it is told that convince us 
that the story must be true. The variations are in 
non-essentials, When it comes to the things that are 
really vital there is complete and even verbal agree- 
ment. Matthew says, “After He came down from the 
mountain behold there came a leper.” Luke, “it came 
to pass when He was ina certain city behold a man full 
of leprosy.” While Mark makes no note either of 
time or place, simply stating “And there came a leper.” 

Mark begins his story of the life of Jesus with 
Jesus a man full grown and a healer of disease. Only 
twenty-two verses of his gospel are written when he 
plunges right into this ministry of healing. The Master 
meets a man in the synagogue with an unclean spirit, 
a man fit for a madhouse, and He makes the man whole. 
Next we read of His coming into Peter’s house and 
finding his wife’s mother sick of a fever, and forth- 

175 


176 When the Morning Wakens 


with lifting her up and causing the fever to leave her. 
And then Mark goes on to record how after sunset 
He kept on ministering to the sick and casting out 
devils—all in this first chapter. 

But when it comes to the heart of the story there 
is not a trace of disagreement. All three evangelists 
report the same facts. Even the gestures noted are 
the same. The leper threw himself on the ground on 
his face. So all of them observe. ‘And Jesus stretched 
forth His hand and touched him.” All observing this 
too! And we must not fail to appreciate what it 
meant. Such a rash demonstration must have fairly 
astounded the people. The very idea of touching a 
leper! Besides it was a bad case because Luke tells 
us the man was full of leprosy. There he was standing 
afar off and crying, “Unclean, Unclean!’ The very 
house in which the poor fellow lived was defiled. Any- 
thing that he came in contact with was polluted and 
had to be purified by the priest before it could be 
used again. His was a loathsome case, fingers falling 
off, face all splotched with white sores till it was 
scarcely human in appearance, voice cracked, for even 
the leper’s voice is affected, head bare, lip covered. 
Everybody knew that to touch a leper was forbidden 
by the law. Leprosy means the decomposition of the 
vital juices and the corroding of the flesh. It does 
not manifest itself in the child but in the adult. The 
leper had no friends. The very dogs barked and 
shrank away. The man was dead to society. And yet 
they all chronicle the fact that the Master reached out 
His hand and touched him. 


“Thy Touch Has Still Its Ancient Power” 177 


And then the words spoken. They are always iden- 
tically phrased: “Lord, if Thou wilt Thou canst make 
me clean.’”’ And the same answer in every case returns, 
“T will, be thou clean.” And immediately the leprosy 
departed. It is worth noting that Mark stresses this 
idea of immediacy. He adds, “‘as soon as He had 
spoken.” “And immediately as soon as He had spoken 
the leprosy departed from him and he was cleansed.”’ 

Such then is the familiar story. It bears on its 
very face the stamp of veracity. The miracle that was 
wrought, the words that were spoken, the gestures that 
were used, the impression that was conveyed—they 
all have about them a simplicity, a reality, a sincerity, 
an accent of genuineness that cannot be denied. So let 
us look a little more closely at the incident and the 
lessons it is intended to teach. 

Consider first of all that expression, “He was moved 
with compassion.” It is the first recorded instance in 
the gospels where we meet these words. And the 
verb is a strong one; literally “He trembled all over 
with compassion.” The evangelists seldom tell us how 
Jesus felt. They give us His words but rarely His 
feelings. And it is Mark who speaks more frequently 
of the feelings of Jesus than any of the other three. 
Luke speaks but once of our Lord’s compassion, in the 
case of the widow of Nain. It is Mark who tells us 
how He was moved with pity when He saw the multi- 
tude as sheep without a shepherd. Christ had com- 
passion with sickness, with hunger, with ignorance, 
with poverty, with spiritual need. These things smote 
His heart and it is Matthew and Mark, and especially 


178 When the Morning Wakens 


Mark, who are always drawing our attention to it. 
When He saw this poor unfortunate, He trembled all 
over with emotion. And the emotion arose not only 
for his own sake but because of the great army that he 
represented. He saw a vast procession of lepers gir- 
dling the globe. He saw the high tide of sickness that 
was washing the shores of human need. We see the 
wave that breaks at our feet, but He saw the ocean. 
We have a vague idea that there is a great surge of 
sorrow in the world, but not until it comes to our 
own doors are we mightily impressed. The Master 
had that sweep of vision that could summon up all 
the lepers. And so His heart ached and bled. 

Consider too a little more intimately that other ex- 
pression, “He put forth His hand and touched him.” 
So often this idea is found in the gospels. So many 
of our Lord’s miracles are wrought by laying his 
hands on the sick. He laid His hand on the deaf and 
dumb lad, we are told, thrust his fingers into his ears 
and said, “Be opened.” He laid His hand on the 
sightless sockets of the blind man who was healed 
gradually. He laid His hand on the demoniac boy at 
the foot of the mountain. ‘He took the little children 
up in His arms, laid His hands on them and blessed 
them.” One can hardly read the sacred page without 
being pulled up short with this statement, “He laid His 
hands on them.” 

Can we not see in it the swift sympathy of the man? 
It was the play of His human feelings. Here was a 
poor homeless excommunicated mortal, cut off from 
everything and everybody. No hand-clasp had been 


“Thy Touch Has Still Its Ancient Power” 179 


his for years. Quite possibly he had felt no kiss of 
affection since he was a child. Everybody backed 
away from him in revulsion, If he had a wife he was 
not allowed to live with her. If he had children he 
was not allowed to play with them. Alone he had 
been walking with that rag over his face and that cry 
“Unclean”’ on his lips, lest any one should come near 
him. How he must have hungered for a human touch! 
Whatever the origin of the disease may be, the Jews 
regarded it as contagious. And Christ comes and 
looks on him and goes up and pulls down the wall of 
separation and stretches out His holy hands and lays 
them on the poor fellow’s sores. What a thrill it must 
have given him! 

I think it was a mark of heavenly sympathy. And 
the lesson is clear. We are to reach out our hands 
too. There are times when the clasp of the hand will 
do far more good than a whole trunk full of sermons. 
All the soup kitchens and free lunches in the world 
cannot take the place of real brotherhood. You can 
knock a fellow down with a kindness if you fling it 
at his head like a snowball. Here is John Ruskin: 
Walking through Whitechapel he would see sights that 
made his heart sick. One day a beggar accosted him 
and asked him for an alms. Feeling in his pocket, he 
said, “I’m sorry, brother, I cannot help you, but I 
haven’t a penny of change.” “You have helped me,” 
the beggar cried, “you called me brother.” If we are 
going to really help men we must get down to their 
level. We must not shrink with horror from the filth 
that we see. We must not tuck our skirts in and go 


180 When the Morning Wakens 


around on tiptoe pointing our finger. We must be 
mighty careful lest we give an impression of any feel- 
ing of superiority. We must rather clasp them by 
the hand with a warm grip and tell them by that very 
grip that we love them and want to help them. 


“°*Tis the human touch in this world that 
counts, 
The touch of your hand and mine, 
Which means far more to the fainting heart 
Than shelter and bread and wine. 


“For shelter is gone when the night is o’er, 
And bread lasts only a day, 
But the touch of the hand and the sound of 
the voice 
Sing on in the soul alway.” 


Consider too the man’s faith in our Lord’s author- 
ity. He did not doubt the Master’s power; what 
troubled him was His willingness. Here there was a 
hesitancy, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst.” Jesus has 
the power. Can He be persuaded to use it? It needs to 
be borne in mind that this was the first recorded case 
of leprosy that the great Physician had met. He had 
cured fever and had cast out devils but thus far no 
leper had been healed. 

Men have no difficulty in believing in the power of 
God. They see it all about them. God and power are 
well-nigh convertible terms. The savage who bows 
down before his wooden idol is moved to do so because 
he feels that this idol has some strange and baleful 


“Thy Touch Has Still Its Ancient Power” 181 


influence over his life. All the gods of mythology 
had power. Jove could hurl thunderbolts. Mars was 
the god of war heavily armed. Mercury could guide 
the shades of the dead to their final resting place. 
They all had power, every last one of them. 

There are three great doxologies in the New Testa- 
ment. “Now unto Him who is able to stablish you” 
(Romans 16:25). Now unto Him who is able to do 
exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or 
think” (Ephesians 3:20). “Now unto Him who is 
able to keep you from falling” (Jude 24). All three 
begin in the same way, “Now unto Him who is abk.” 
It is a triumphant statement of God’s power. But this 
poor leper adds another thought, You are able, Lord, 
if You are only willing. It is not difficult to believe 
in the power of God, but to get firmly lodged in men’s 
hearts the firm conviction of the love of God, that 
He is more willing to give gifts to us than earthly 
parents are to their children—well, that sometimes is a 
formidable task. 

And the great attack upon religion to-day is directed 
right here. It is against the love of God that the guns 
of the enemy are turned. In a world so full of cruelty 
how can God be good, we hear men say. This is the 
stock interrogation of unbelief. With so many bloody 
threads woven into the texture of things, how can He 
be kind? Does not every living thing feed upon some 
other living thing? Does not the starfish live upon the 
shellfish and the pickerel upon the starfish and the osprey 
upon the pickerel and the eagle upon the osprey? Is 
not the ocean bed a vast Colosseum, the floor of which 


182 When the Morning Wakens 


literally reeks with blood? Is not every living creature 
armed? Is not nature red in tooth and claw? The 
ring snake devours the frog and the ophi snake devours 
the ring snake, and does it in seemingly a very cruel 
manner, the tussle occupying sometimes the best part 
of an hour, as he clamps his victim with his venomous 
jaws and so tires him out. Have you ever watched a 
wood worm boring its way through the trunk of a 
tree? And then did you see the woodpecker with sharp 
beak tapping on the surface of the tree trying to locate 
the hollow nest where the little worm lies? And then 
did you watch the hungry hawk come swooping down 
attracted by the tapping? And then did you observe 
the cat stealing along the fence and getting ready for 
his deadly spring? These facts are all about us. They 
cannot be disclaimed. Things are not cemented in this 
world with maple syrup. 

- But then another thought arises. There is a senti- 
mentalism which makes reptiles and fish feel like men 
and women. We must not read our human sensitive- 
ness into every living thing. Nature is not nearly as 
red and ruthless as she is usually painted. She has 
many ways of alleviating the agony. As we go down 
in the life scale, pain diminishes. Worms and jelly- 
fish do not suffer. We are not attempting to ignore 
ugly facts. No use putting mustard in one’s mouth 
and claiming it isn’t hot. Mustard is always hot, and 
nature is always relentless. But there is a healing virtue 
in both. And there are at least hints in nature’s case 
that the power is being mercifully administered and 
leniently enforced. 


“Thy Touch Has Still Its Ancient Power” 183 


And anyway that aside, what does it prove? Does 
it make love any less divine? Is the divinity of power 
greater than the divinity of love? Contrariwise is it 
not all the other way? Is not the latter infinitely the 
greater? Is not the very glory of our faith that love 
is the great supreme thing? Many there are who seem 
to think that the great attribute of God is His might. 
It is here that the Westminster Catechism definition 
puts the emphasis: “God is a spirit, infinite and eternal 
and unchangeable in His power.’’ But the error is 
fundamental. God’s power does not come first; it does 
not even come second. The order should be: first love, 
then holiness, then power. 

Well, this is a touching story and it comes home to 
us all. Father Stanton in his commentary on the 
passage plays the theme with variations. How many 
a poor discouraged soul broken in health has gone down 
on his knees and said, “Lord if Thou wilt Thou canst 
make me strong. I want to be well: I want to be strong. 
I seem to have had nothing but sickness and pain all my 
life; I’ve been an invalid for years.”’ How many have 
spent their thousands and tens of thousands in search 
of health! 

Or if it has not been health it has been something 
else. Maybe unhappiness or failure or infelicity or 
soul ache of some kind or other. How many have 
cried, “Lord if Thou wilt Thou canst make me happy. 
I am not happy. My spirit is broken. The cruel 
world has gone against me. It has treated me hard. 
My home is gone, and I am heavy of heart.” 

But this poor fellow did not ask for happiness or 


184 When the Morning Wakens 


success or smile of fortune. His cry was, “Lord, if 
Thou wilt Thou canst make me clean.” Wonderful 
prayer! The faith of it! And it prevailed. Surely 
a prayer such as this must always prevail. The Master 
takes up his own words and returns them laden with 
hope and promise: “I will, be thou clean, and immedi- 
ately the leprosy departed from him and he was 
cleansed.” 

There is a little poem of a bird that has broken free 
from its cage and has flown up into the sky. And the 
bird asks God why He kept her in a cage so long: 


“Up on God’s window sill 

Carolling high and shrill 

Shaken with ecstasy 

At last clung my spirit free. 

God showed His glorious head. 

Singing to Him I said: 

Who was it did me wrong? 

Why was I caged so long, 

Tangled with wings and strings 
Under the stars? 

God said, ‘I made the wings: 
You made the bars!’ 


XV 


“By Some Clear Winning Word of Love” 


“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold 
in pictures of silver.” 


Proverbs 25:11. 


AND first just a word as to the meaning of the verse. 
Scholars tell us that the word for fitly literally signi- 
fies wheels. The marginal reading says ‘“‘a word spoken 
on wheels.”’ And that suggests two ideas. 

It may mean a word timely spoken, spoken at the 
right time, seasonably spoken; the idea being that of 
the seasons revolving. How many we know are apt 
to speak at the wrong time! They say the right thing, 
it may be, but at the wrong time. Even the wisest words 
if spoken at the wrong time may do more harm than 
good. We must confer with opportunity. We must 
speak opportunely. Opportunity is doing the right 
thing at the right time. There are occasions when 
even words of Scripture may be an offense. Neither 
the time nor the tone may be in keeping. There are 
not many things more difficult to do than to give wise 
advice wisely. The Master said, “I have yet many 


things to say to you but ye cannot bear them now.” 
185 


186 When the Morning Wakens 


Others insist that the idea is that of smoothness. 
How smoothly things move on wheels! The wheels 
of your motor car, how silently and easily they roll! 
There is no creak or groan or friction. Every part 
is ingeniously fitted together, all centering in a ball- 
bearing socket. It is the poetry of motion. 

Goethe said to Eckerman that women are plates of 
silver on which men place apples of gold. He spoke 
as an artist. He meant that the women he created 
were better far than those one meets in real life. There 
is no such person as the “Beatrice” Dante idealized. 
Just as our immortal Washington is largely a “steel 
engraving.” Goethe brought the golden apple of his 
art to women who were at best made of silver. But the 
remark is symbolic. There are golden apples of friend- 
ship as well as art that are ofttimes placed on plates of 
silver, maybe plates of earthenware; golden apples of 
love; golden apples of sacrifice; golden apples of devo- 
tion. In the verse before us the symbolism is verbal; 
golden apples of kindly thinking and charitable speak- 
ing. The apple tree is very rare in Palestine. Without 
question what the writer means is the orange tree. 
Have you never seen an orange tree laden with ripe 
golden fruit, the little balls peeping through its shiny 
leaves? The leaves are evergreen and look for all the 
world like dead silver: “Apples of gold with a back- 
ground of silver.’ And when we put these thoughts 
together what a lovely picture it makes! A word fitly 
spoken is a delightful thing. It ministers joy and 
delight. Its taste is delicious, its appearance is beauti- 
ful, its blossoms are fragrant. It sweetens the air. It 


“By Some Clear Winning Word of Love” 187 


cheers the heart. A word fitly spoken can do all this. 
It is like apples of gold in pictures of silver. 

What wonderful thing are words! There are 
450,000 in Funk & Wagnall’s New Standard Diction- 
ary. Consider how many we use every day, anywhere 
from two to five thousand. It has been estimated that if 
a man lives seventy years his conversation would fill 
a library of something like 4,000 volumes of three 
hundred pages each. Some people’s vocabulary is very 
limited, perhaps not to more than a few hundred words. 
The average uneducated man, it is said, uses less than 
500 words to express himself. Shakespeare, on the 
contrary, calls into play about 23,000 and Milton about 
15,000. There are 14,000 words in the Bible. 


“Words are things and a small drop of ink 
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces 
That which makes thousands perhaps millions 
think.” 


Max Miller once said that the most amazing thing 
about the human race was the gift of language, and he 
certainly knew what he was talking about when he 
spoke on language. He was an authority on that 
score. He claimed that without language there could 
be no thought. “No thought without language, no 
language without thought,’’ was the way he phrased 
it. “Words are the coins we use to carry on our 
thinking business.” We get at the quality of a 
man’s life through his language quicker than in any 
other way. As are the words, so is the man. “Out of 
the abundance fo the heart the mouth speaketh.” The 


N 


188 When the Morning Wakens 


New Testament speaks of a man’s character as his walk 
and conversation. Most people, alas! are not experts 
in the wielding of language. It is a difficult weapon 
to handle. It is a sharp razor that cuts. And we can- 
not be too careful how we use it. “The tongue is an 
unruly member.” Experts have tamed lions and tigers 
and all sorts of monsters but no expert has ever tamed 
the tongue. 

The Bible is always telling us to watch our tongues. 
It is ever warning us to guard our words. It speaks of 
vain words, idle words, false words, kind words, whole- 
some words, acceptable word’. ‘For every idle word 
that men shall speak they shall give an account.” And 
idle here means useless, ineffectual for good. Our words 
must not only be not evil, they must be actively good. 
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” James 
says. “A world of iniquity is in the tongue.” And that 
is a very striking expression. It means that the tongue 
can commit any sin. The hand can be murderous, the 
eye can be lustful. But there is no command that the 
tongue cannot break. It can be murderous and lustful 
and profane and proud and hypocritical and cruel. 
No evil passion but can find lodgment and expression 
in the tongue. It is a fire that burns up the whole 
nature. Some one has said, “If you were to divide 
the sins of the world into two parts, half of them would 
be sins of the tongue.” The tongue can inspire the 
noblest deeds of chivalry or it can let loose the most 
cruel shafts of deviltry. It began its deadly work in 
Eden and it has been at the venomous business ever 
since. 


“By Some Clear Winning Word of Love” 189 


There is no weapon so quick and powerful as the 
weapon of words: no sword so sharp. What has 
tyranny dreaded more? What has liberty coveted 
more? Who can weigh what has been passed in 
parliaments or assemblies by the magic of words? 
“Help me to deal honestly with words,” says Vandyke, 
“for they are alive.’ We say sometimes, “Oh, talk is 
cheap”, ‘Words are but wind”; “Good words won’t 
fill a sack.” The proverbs on the subject are not at all 
complimentary. Perhaps the one that is most com- 
monly quoted is, “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” 
The idea being that if words are so dangerous we had 
better not use them at all. But the saying is only a 
half truth. There are times when silence is wicked, 
when to seal one’s lips is a criminal shame. It is a sin to 
say in a fit of passion the word that hurts, but it is no 
less a sin to leave unspoken the word that helps and 
heals. Fire is a dangerous master but what a blessed 
kindly ministering servant! 

A ship is a mighty thing but it is turned with ease 
by the rudder. And human life is like a ship in more 
ways than one. It carries its greatest peril within. 
When the shaft of an ocean liner breaks, it is apt to 
become a battering ram and gore her. “Keep thy 
tongue from evil,” that is, from speaking evil. Because 
the only harm the tongue can do is when it breaks loose 
and runs unbridled. Then it becomes a weapon of 
danger within as well as without. When a thought is 
released it is no longer ours; it belongs to the world. 
It travels by radio and no reporter on the wings of 
lightning can catch it. No fire on the mountains in 


190 When the Morning Wakens 


JAaugust spreads like bad news. He who lets an ugly 
word drop from his mouth can never lasso it. “Under 
the tongue is mischief and vanity. As the tongue is so 
is the heart. When Mr. Edison was asked whether he 
ever expected to invent an instrument to see down into 
his neighbor’s heart, his reply was, ‘God forbid that I 
should publish it to the world. “For,” said he, “did 
we all see down into the secret thoughts of one another, 
human life would be no longer bearable on the earth. 
There would not be two friends left to trust one an- 
other, and to love one another. Family life would fly 
apart.” 


“Boys, flying kites, haul in their white-winged birds, 
You cannot do that way when you're flying words, 
Careful with fire is good advice I know; 

Careful with words is ten times doubly so. 

Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back 
dead, 

But God himself can’t kill them when they’re said.” 


If all this be true, how are we to know when a word 
is fitly spoken. What rule are we to judge by? The 
chapter from which our text is taken is a chapter on 
how to live with one another and avoid contentiousness 
and wrangling. It treats of talebearing and back- 
biting and ruling one’s spirit and singing songs to the 
heavy hearted. There is a wise motto about repeating 
anything one hears. First, ask is it true, then is it 
necessary, and then is it kind? A word fitly spoken is 
all three. It is true, it is necessary, it is kind. 


“By Some Clear Winning Word of Love” 191 


Is Ir TRUE? Truth has been called the root of all 
the virtues. Few things are baser than falsehood. 
There is an old proverb that “Sin has many tools but a 
lie is the handle that fits them all.”” When we look down 
upon the troubles of the world we observe that the 
most of them are caused by falsehood. “I hate and 
abhor lying,” the Psalmist says. What a wonderful 
teacher is science in this regard! Science is a search 
for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 
The true scientist scorns deception. With him truth 
is absolute and supreme. A lie is never justifiable 
to the scientist—never. He has a real passion for the 
facts. Sometimes the question is asked, What is the 
greatest thing in the world? There is no doubt to the 
true scientist what that is. And is religion to take a 
lower ground than science? 

Is IT NECESSARY? Sometimes we hear the expres- 
sion “‘A mischievous tongue.” It deals in mischief. It 
loves to create mischief. It trades in gossip, especially 
scandalous gossip. It exaggerates. It aims to stir up 
trouble, just as bad boys try to get dogs a fighting. A 
mischievous tongue can cut like a sword and open a 
wound that may straightway become infected. What 
striking pictures are word pictures! Here is our word 
sarcasm. It is derived from sarx, meaning flesh. 
When the Roman horseman lost his temper with his 
faithful dumb brute, he lifted a loaded whip and struck 
the creature a cruel blow that made the flesh quiver 
and the blood spurt. And there are those whose 
tongues are lashes that cut and cause bleeding. They 
feel impelled to pass on everything they hear. They 


192 When the Morning Wakens 


are incendiaries. They love to stand off and watch 
the blaze they start. But we should always ask our- 
selves, Is it necessary to pass this stuff on? What 
good will be gained by passing it on? What 
good will even I myself gain? What good will 
anybody gain? ‘There are times when even kind words 
had better not be spoken. When Rachel weeps for her 
children we must not always feel it imperative on us 
to talk. Often it is far more considerate and sympa- 
thetic to step aside and be still. 


“Words are mighty, words are living: 
Serpents with their venomous stings, 
Or bright angels, crowding round us, 
With heaven’s light upon their wings; 
Every word has its own spirit, 

True or false, that never dies; 
Every word man’s lips have uttered 
Echoes in God’s skies.” 


We will not pause to consider lips that are profane 
because Hoc est alia res. The tongue is God’s gift. 
For it we should be profoundly grateful. How great 
is the sin when it is made the instrument to insult the 
one who gave us the gift! If the heart be sweet the 
language will be sweet. So many mouths are not clean. 
The breath is offensive, oftentimes the reason being that 
the vocabulary is poor. A wise man once remarked 
how “Dogs have more ways of expressing themselves 
with their tails than some men have with their tongues.” 

Is 1r KIND? No one is justified in telling even the 
truth if the telling thereof is going to hurt a human 


“By Some Clear Winning Word of Love” 193 


heart or soil a human reputation. If such things are 
likely, let him keep silent. Because a word can cut 
like a lancet or it can heal like balsam. “Speak the 
truth,” the Apostle says, “but speak it in love.”” Some 
people’s tongues are like the tongues of lions—very 
rough. If you let them lick your hand, they will soon 
file the skin away. Like Iago, they joy to inflict pain. 
Never are they so happy as when pulling a fellow mor- 
tal down. Do you recall that passage in the Purgatorio 
where Dante is alarmed by the shaking of the moun- 
tain? He is told that it is due to the mighty song that 
everybody is singing every time a soul is moved to pass 
upward. Surely that is the better way. For the 
success of one is the advantage of all. 

So let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: 
We should aim to speak helpful words, encouraging 
words, cheery words. How superficial and shallow 
most of our converse is! How rarely it gets below 
the surface! How very seldom it touches the deeper 
things of life! It is mostly about our health and the 
weather and how many holes we played in par. The 
world is full of people who are lonely and storm-beaten 
and sad. They are waiting for a word of encourage- 
ment and sympathy. 


“Help me the slow of heart to move 
By some clear winning word of love.” 


Many are sensitive, and some are supersensitive. 
They take all sorts of trouble to nurse imaginary 
slights, A grain of sand gets into their eye and instead 
of washing it away they keep on rubbing it till the 


194 When the Morning Wakens 


whole organ is inflamed and the eye is swollen and 
red and painful. Let us speak the word of cheer. 
Let us scatter seeds of kindness. Let us drop flowers 
along the way. And let us not wait. Let us do it now. 


“Tf with pleasure you are viewing any work a man 
is doing, 
If you like him or you love him, tell him now; 
Don’t withhold your approbation till the parson 
makes oration 
As he lies with snowy lilies o’er his brow; 
For no matter how you shout it, he won’t really care 
about it; 
He won’t know how many tear drops you have 
shed ; 
If you think some praise is due him, now’s the time 
to slip it to him, 
For he cannot read his tombstone when he’s dead! 


“More than fame and more than money is the com- 
mend kind and sunny 
And the hearty, warm approval of a friend; 
For it gives to life a savor, and it makes you stronger, 
braver, 
And it gives you heart and spirit to the end. 
If he earns your praise—bestow it; if you like him— 
let him know it; 
Let the words of true encouragement be said; * 
Do not wait till life is over and he’s underneath the 
clover 
For he cannot read his tombstone when he’s dead.” 


XVI 


“Land Where My Fathers Died” 


“Render unto Cesar the things that are 
Cesar’s and unto God the things that are 
God’s.” 

Matthew 22:21. 


AN organization was inaugurated in England during 
the last year by the name of Copec. It started as a 
conference on politics, economics and citizenship, and 
that is how it got its name; Copec consisting of the 
first letters of these words. ‘The conference was an 
inquiry into the relationship existing between religion 
and the great secular problems that are disturbing the 
world. Does our political creed square with our Chris- 
tian belief? Are our business standards in accord with 
the spirit of the Golden Rule? Are we loyal citizens 
of the land where our lot happens to be cast, as well 
as of the spiritual kingdom to which we profess to 
belong? These were the agenda of the conference. 
They are great and far-reaching questions. Let us 
look at them in the light of our own constitution and 
the practical problems before us to-day. 

I. And first of all Politics. What is politics? Politics 
is the science of government. It is righteousness and 

195 


196 When the Morning Wakens 


justice applied to human affairs. How am I to live 
in peace and fellowship with my fellow man—that is 
politics. We could not worry along in any half decent 
way at all were it not for politics. So that the man 
who speaks disparagingly of politics and boasts that 
he is not interested in it is like the man in the French 
play who expressed his surprise that he had been talk- 
ing grammar all his life without ever knowing it. 

There are many to-day who are saying that the 
preacher has no business to dabble in politics. Let 
him stick to his last. The pulpit is not the place to 
advocate amendments to the Constitution, or statutes 
for the states. Others draw a line between the min- 
ister as a priest and the minister as a citizen, arguing 
that what is improper in the one is perfectly legitimate 
and proper in the other, It all goes back, it would 
seem, to our definition of what politics really is. It is 
not the preacher’s province to line up with any political 
party unless some great reform is at stake. He should 
be an Independent as far as that is concerned, a mug- 
wump if you like. The question for him is not between 
Republicans and Democrats but as between good Re- 
publicans and bad Republicans, between good Demo- 
crats and bad Democrats, between good Prohibitionists 
and bad Prohibitionists, for there are good and bad 
here too. Let him confine himself to the great moral 
issues, and leave the debatable details of their applica- 
tion to others. 

The whole trouble is that politics is so oftentimes 
confounded with party politics, and that to-day is an 
equation strange and puzzling beyond words. The 


“Land Where My Fathers Died” 197 


phrase has become corrupted. It has come to be mixed 
up with personalities and abuse. It has become a stag- 
nant pond covered over with a scum of bigotry and 
prejudice and unscrupulousness. It has become a muddy 
road on which the traveler is almost certain to get 
splashed. All of which is most unfortunate. And so it 
transpires that many to-day are denouncing the party 
system and calling for its abolition. But because a 
thing has been abused is no good reason why it should 
be abolished. What good thing has not been abused? 
Bear in mind it is either the party system or the bloc 
system, or anarchy which is no system at all. Ger- 
many to-day has fourteen group organizations; France 
has nine; England has half a dozen. Are these coun- 
tries any better off? If history shows anything, it 
proves that political combinations and coalitions, except 
in times of great crises, have never been a real success. 
It looks very much indeed as if party politics was in- 
evitable and one of the conditions of party government. 
The existence of two great parties has gone hand in 
hand with human progress and human achievement. 
When these have broken up into fragments, then co- 
hesion has been lost and there has been retreat. 

It is not party politics but partisan politics that is 
the tap root of our political troubles. Sometimes we 
hear the expression, ‘Playing politics,’ the inference 
being that the game is not on the level. Many of our 
representatives in Congress to-day are not our repre- 
sentatives at all. They have been “playing politics.” 
Many of them are nothing more than small selfish time- 
servers, using the people they were elected to serve. It 


198 When the Morning Wakens 


has been all for office and graft, nothing for honor and 
principle and country. It is such things as these that 
have dragged politics into the dirt. Abraham Lincoin 
once said that if our government is ever demoralized 
it will come from this incessant human wriggle and 
struggle for office, which is only another way of living 
without working. Here we have forty-eight individual 
states with their representatives playing the crooked 
game, voting so as to make themselves secure. One 
feels with the poet: 


“God give us men; a time like this demands 
Strong hearts, true faith and willing hands. 
Men whom the lust of office cannot kill; 

Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy; 
Men who possess opinions and a will; 
Men who have honor; men who will not lie. 
For while the rabble with their thumb-worn 
creeds, 
Their large professions and their little deeds, 

Wrangle in selfish strife, Lo! Freedom weeps; 
Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice 

sleeps.” 


When one looks around and sees things as they are, 
one does not wonder sometimes that men have had 
such a rooted aversion to what ought to be, and was 
meant to be, a great and noble science—the whole pro- 
cedure is so corrupt. They prefer to stand aloof. And 
yet is there any zone of service to-day where upright 
men are more needed than in the governmental arena? 


“Land Where My Fathers Died” 199 


How is the base thing ever to rise above the low level 
of votes, unless high-grade men hear the call of country 
and respond? Never was the old saying more true 
than to-day that “it is the apathy of the good that makes 
possible the dynasty of the bad.’”’ If the people who 
are capable refuse to serve, then there is nothing else to 
do but to fall back on the incapable. The patriot shrinks 
from duty and so the adventurer climbs to power. The 
answer of the minister who was severely criticized 
because his official board was no better than it was, tells 
the whole tale. ‘I know that,” he said, “but if the 
good Lord is going to have a church down in my quar- 
ter He must make it out of the stuff that’s willing to 
act.” 

Howard Crosby once remarked, “To let politics 
become a cesspool and then to avoid it because it is a 
cesspool is a double crime.” The greatest cataclysm 
of modern history, until our own World War, was the 
French Revolution. And what was the cause of that 
awful convulsion? One line tells everything. It was 
caused because the best men in their love of ease repu- 
diated their responsibility, and turned to the Robes- 
pierres and Marats and Dantons to come and take the 
scepter. They did not render unto Cesar the things 
that were Czsar’s. I make bold to claim that the man 
who runs away from his political privileges is a cow- 
ardly traitor. He is deserting the high post of duty. 
Political freedom is vital to the development of all our 
great historic institutions. All history corroborates the 
fact that only as political freedom is established can 
science and religion and literature thrive. It was 


200 When the Morning Wakens 


among the free citizens of Athens and not among the 
military slaves of Sparta that Greek art and philosophy 
and culture flourished. Do we realize that military 
Sparta has left us no literature, while Athens has be- 
queathed to us a literature which even to-day is one 
of the wonders of the world? And if one can read the 
signals of the future, one is tempted to say that the 
time is coming when politics will be a coveted privilege, 
when the very best men will turn aside from the piling 
up of great possessions and serve their city and state 
and fatherland. All along the line the call to-day is for 
men who can think and plan and execute. Because, as 
Dr. Ely once put it, “Every political question is a social 
question and every social question is at heart a religious 
question.” 

Il. Then there is the question of Economics. The 
preacher’s duty toward economic questions is the same 
as toward political questions. He must not be a par- 
tisan. He must see the possible good in all—in indi- 
vidualism, in paternalism, in socialism, in labor unions, 
in government control. He must see both sides of 
every controversy. The very moment he becomes a 
partisan he loses power. 

Many are the changes that have come over religious 
thought during the past fifty years, but it seems that 
no change is so radical as the transfer of interest from 
the other world to this. Give us something for to-day, 
is the cry we hear. Tell us how to remedy the 
social evils that are around us, especially how to lessen 
poverty and disease and unemployment. The great 
problem the average man wants to see solved is, how 


=> ea ee 


“Land Where My Fathers Died” 201 


can the masses be made more comfortable? He is 
not greatly concerned about any generous draft on the 
bank of Heaven; what he wants is a fairer deposit 
in the banks of earth. We all confess to an economic 
disarrangement in the world to-day, and how to rectify 
and adjust it, how to inform society with the spirit 
of justice is the problem of the hour, Everybody 
knows, who has thought seriously at all, that religion 
these days is undergoing a social revival. Where our 
fathers discussed their relations to God, we are analyz- 
ing our relations to our fellow men. ‘The questions 
that men are asking to-day are not the questions our 
fathers were asking a hundred years ago. Men to-day 
are not so much interested in justification as in justice. 
There are a goodly number of theologians even whe 
are contending that if Christ were tc return to earth 
to-day, His interest would be in social rather than 
ecclesiastical matters. The object of Christianity is 
acknowledged by every thinking man at the present 
hour to be the moralizing of our human relations, and 
the reconstruction of a juster and happier and more 
peaceable world. 

No thoughtful man, it would seem, can be satisfied 
with the present state of human affairs. It is based 
too largely on selfishness. What is the fundamental 
evil? There are two answers to that question. One is 
poverty, the other is slavery. Let us look at this a 
moment and suppose we start with the family. Be-. 
cause the family is the corner stone of human society. 
And that leads at the very outset to the housing prob- 
lem. We are told that five per cent of our working 


202 When the Morning Wakens 


classes live in slums. We are told furthermore that 
_ here in New York City anywhere from fifty to seventy- 
five homes are maintained for girls whose wages will 
not allow them to live in ordinary dwellings. The 
housing problem is a question of poverty. The slum 
is the standing stigma on our economic life. “It is an 
outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible 
disgrace.” It is a disgrace because it does not need 
to be. It is the scandal of our economic system. It 
is society's cancerous cell. The time is certainly 
coming, and coming soon, when it will disappear. 
Surely it is a dirty blot on our civilization in a world 
as wide and roomy as this, where light and air 
and sunshine fairly force themselves into every cranny, 
that people should have to live and rear their children 
in dark, dingy, unhealthy holes, huddled together like 
animals, in ignorance and squalor and want. 

To be sure this is only part of a larger question. 
Our whole industrial system is at stake. And a good 
many are coming to realize that the key to the problem 
is a religious one. It is not a matter of the sword 
but of the spirit. The whole question goes back to the 
family. The feeling we have in our homes must be 
carried outside our homes. No child of ours, if we 
can help it, will go hungry or cold or naked or loveless. 
And when we have transferred that feeling to the 
entire family of man, the social question will be solved. 
The common good must take precedence of private 
gain. It is simply building up the state on the mind of 
Christ. 

The Government can do a great deal to help, but 


“Land Where My Fathers Died” 203 


consecrated leadership can do a great deal more. The 
crying need of the hour is the baptism of both Capital 
and Labor with the spirit of the Golden Rule. We can- 
not change the system until we change the ideals of 
the men who control the system. <A great employer 
can do more to remove the causes of industrial unrest 
than all the politicians or the theologians. Think what 
it means to give a high standard of ethics to a factory 
where thousands of people are earning their daily 
bread. Laws will not do it. Nothing will do it but a 
certain spirit. A headmaster gives tone to his school. 
Indeed, the school to-day is very largely the head- 
master. I have seen one man change the whole atmos- 
phere of an industrial plant in a time of strike. You 
cannot conquer selfishness and materialism by force. 
Nothing will ever succeed but justice and fair play and 
good will and brotherly love. 

Mr. Bernard Shaw says the Golden Rule is that there 
is no golden rule. It is not a rule of gold but of spirit. 
A few months ago a man distributed among his em- 
ployees $600,000 worth of stock. He calls it the 
Golden Rule in business. He believes, as many others 
do, that profit-sharing is the ideal condition under the 
competitive system. He does it in the name of Christ. 
He might well do it in the name of America. And 
the hours of women workers were reduced to seven a 
day instead of eight. And this is the reason he gave: 


“T simply want to say that it seems to me to be absurd 
and an insult to the Master Himself to talk about 
building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth in church 


204 When the Morning Wakens 


and religious meetings and then when we come to our 
factories and industries claim the whole thing is im- 
practical.” 


Now whatever we may think of this, it is certainly 
putting the human above the machine. It is proclaiming 
to the world the fact that we are all comrades in a great 
task, aye in a great struggle. And the point again is 
that this economic question at bottom is a religious 
question. It is something that concerns the church. 
And one of the saddest things about the whole busi- 
ness is that the church is rarely consulted. It is quietly 
assumed that we have nothing to contribute, nothing 
to say, at least nothing worth listening to. Men turn 
everywhere else for light except to the Bible and the 
church. The church is only a group of goody goody 
pious idealists, It is a stinging rebuke to us who call 
ourselves followers of the man who really loved the 
people. We have been quarreling over incense and 
vestments and fundamentalism and modernism and 
creeds and medieval mummery and all that sort of 
moldy moth-eaten stuff that nobody cares a picayune 
about, instead of trying to lead a bewildered bleeding 
world out of its materialism and selfishness and strife 
and war and avarice and greed. When a General in the 
English army says he will support any government 
that will keep war going on (and when it has ceased, 
stir it up again), it is time for us to tell that man he is 
no better than a naked barbarian, and some of us would 
say not half as good. It reminds one of Von Moltke 
when he said that the hope of universal peace was a 





“Land Where My Fathers Died” 205 


dream, and then he added these awful words, “not 
even a beautiful dream.”’ 

III. Then there is the question of Citizenship. 
Every good Christian is a good citizen. Surely a 
Christian cannot rightly claim the privileges of citizen- 
ship without fulfilling its functions. Are we to get 
all we can from the community and give nothing in 
return? Are we to absorb all the blessings of a well- 
governed nation and not discharge any share of its 
obligations? Is that the teaching of our faith? A 
good citizen is an ornament to the place to which 
he belongs. What a luster Burns has conferred upon 
Ayr or Livingstone upon Glasgow! How many of 
you will go to Stratford this summer! A man of 
genius may make the name of his town known to the 
farthest corners of the earth. Think of our own 
Rochester and the Mayo boys. 

The Duke of Wellington once said that “patriotism 
was the last refuge of a scoundrel.” I am not sure 
that I understand just what he meant when he spoke 
these words. Probably he had in mind those people 
who are always prattling about their patriotism, but 
who are violating the laws of their country every day 
in their own lives. We all know there is a good deal 
that labels itself patriotism that is of a very unsavory 
stamp. <A true patriot loves his country’s good name 
more than he does its wealth or commercial greatness. 
And a true patriot never hates any other country. He 
can say with John Wesley, “The world is my parish.” 
The man who sows the seeds of hate between nations 


206 When the Morning Wakens 


to-day is not a patriot but a parasite. He is a jingo, a 
conspirator. “Charity begins at home, but it is a 
mighty poor brand that ends at home.’”’ When Con- 
gress passed the Immigration Bill, Admiral Yamamoto, 
former Premier of Japan, said: “No amount of preach- 
ing or missionary work can convince us now that 
Christianity is an effective prevention of wars and 
racial struggle.” The gospel of brotherhood has re- 
ceived its biggest check in 100 years. 

And a true patriot does not hesitate to condemn his 
country when he feels she is in the wrong. When 
Pitt tried to prevent England from making war on the 
United States he was branded as a traitor. But history 
stamps him to-day a great Englishman. When John 
Bright thundered against the Crimean War he was 
mocked and jeered at. But history to-day proves that 
he was right and his critics wrong. The struggle wasa 
tragic blunder which no one now defends. The true 
patriot will stand up for his fatherland when it is 
right. “My country right or wrong” is the Devil’s 
patriotism. In the great words of Daniel O’Connell, 
“Nothing can be politically right which is morally 
wrong.” 

Now there is a widespread feeling to-day that the 
tone of our citizenship is below par. We are suffering 
from high blood pressure. On all sides we hear grave 
doubts as to the future of Democratic government. 
The demagogue for one thing is with us, and there 
is no greater danger to our institutions than the dema- 
gogue. And, unfortunately, our land is full of them, 


ee 


“Land Where My Fathers Died” 207 


there were several in Congress. Consider for one thing 
the apathy of the average voter as to his civic responsi- 
bility. When we read that only forty-four per cent of 
the voting strength of our country went to the ballot 
box in 1923, and that it only represented fifty-seven per 
cent of our voting strength, when we read that in New 
York City almost as many stayed away from the polls 
as voted, that in California more stayed away than 
voted, while in Louisiana five stayed at home to every 
one who registered his franchise, is it to be wondered 
at that we have bosses and government by the machine? 
When the reins of power pass from fewer to fewer, 
from small committees to still smaller ones, the boss 
is inevitable off there at the end. 

Or consider our disrespect of law. We all know, for 
history is clear on the point, that disrespect for law 
is the supreme danger of all republican rule. It is the 
one grave peril to a democracy. The big problem 
before the American people to-day is not the Eighteenth 
Amendment, for that is only part of a larger issue. 
There is more at stake than the Eighteenth Amend- 
ment. The big problem before our country to-day is 
this: Are we determined to enforce what we have 
written into the Constitution? That is the point at 
stake. And it is the Alpha and Omega of all good 
government. The denial of it thunders out the failure 
of democracy. Contempt for authority will steal away 
any nation’s birthright. Of course when it comes to 
the liquor traffic we know what to expect. The liquor 
traffic has always been a criminal. It has always been 
associated with crime. And it has not changed its 


208 When the Morning Wakens 


nature within the last seven years. It takes more than 
seven years for the Ethiopian to change his skin, or 
the leopard his spots. We know from the past what 
to expect to-day. We have had some experience. We 
cannot be fooled along that line. 

Let us put the whole matter into a nutshell. The 
great issue before us to-day is: Is every man to be a 
law unto himself? We all want to see the law of 
justice administered. We all wish to see the law 
administered that protects human property and human 
life. It is quite possible and quite likely that we do 
not all cherish some of the laws that govern us, but 
our business is not to pick out the ones that suit us 
best and scrap the rest. Law should be obeyed because 
it is the law. The provisions of the Constitution are 
sacred; not some of them, all of them. When people 
of influence break one law, what is to prevent those 
who have no influence breaking another? The man 
of means wants his home safe and his business plant 
secure, but how can he expect that if he deliberately 
scouts some clause that runs counter to his thirsty 
fancy? We have many classes in the United States 
but we have none who are exempt from the law. The 
Republic cannot survive half obedient, half defiant. 
As Patrick Henry said in his message to the people 
of Massachusetts: “I am not a Virginian, I am an 
American.” Or asa greater than Patrick Henry said: 
“Render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s and 
unto God the things that are God’s.” 

Professor Leighton in his book “Religion and the 


“Land Where My Fathers Died” 209 


Mind of To-day,” has a chapter on “The Recrudescence 
of Paganism” in which he closes with these words: 


“Why should we boast ourselves and swell with pride 
because God has given to us the greatest natural oppor- 
tunity that has ever fallen to the lot of a nation? We 
have, indeed, with unexampled headlong energy trans- 
formed the natural face of this great continent, and 
even prodigally wasted our resources. But what abid- 
ing contributions have we made to the spiritual heritage 
of the race? In other words, what have we achieved 
in those realms of human production that cannot be 
weighed and appraised by the senses? I do not know 
any lesson that needs to be driven home more insis- 
tently and forcibly to our people than that Athens, 
the intellectual mother of our culture, was, in the 
days of her greatest glory, a city less than half the 
size of Buffalo, and that Palestine, the fountain-head 
of the redeeming ethical and religious powers in our 
life, had a smaller area than the State of Vermont. 
Amidst our great swelling words of ‘progress,’ it is 
well to call to mind such facts, and to ask ourselves 
what shall insure the spiritual immortality of our na- 
tion, when in the political vicissitudes of history it shall 
have gone the way of all peoples? Politically, the 
Israel of Isaiah and Jesus, and the Athens of Sophocles 
and Plato have long since fallen before the scythe of 
Time, but spiritually they will endure as long as the 
light of reflective thought, and the spur of moral and 
religious aspiration move in the soul of man. Their 
names are written in the Lamb’s book of life, their 


210 When the Morning Wakens 


acts endure in the everlasting movements of the spirit. 
Shall we seek for our nation a like remembrance and 
persistence, or shall we be content to leave our records 
in the dust to which all merely material achievement 
eventually returns?” 


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